


RGB

by Rigil_Kentauris



Series: Series I [2]
Category: Alpha Protocol
Genre: Archiving, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-28 04:24:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10823700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: //Series I'd because I personally cannot make it through the first freakin' paragraph of this, much less the second.Upon reflection, I think the problem was I was writing for a character I didn't particularly like at the time, in a genre/trope that I'd didn't particularly like at the time and had never done before, in a happy tone that my miserable angsty self wasn't familiar with writing, and on top of all this I did this in about two weeks, which I felt pretty neat about at the time and now im just like. hey. past me. dont. time is our friend. not food. anyway it was a gift and they enjoyed it at the time so its served its purpose more or less. but i cant delete the bastard because. there are like nine works in the entire ap tag. and this is currently the second longest.Old summary:Most people got their colors years ago. Sean Darcy never did. Hedidget a career in espionage. And he'salsoabout to catch a thief.Old Additional Tags:freelancer!Thorton × Soulmate Color AU × Spies & Secret AgentsAU where you start getting your colors the first time you see your soulmate





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heheSidhe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heheSidhe/gifts).



> //Series I'd because I personally cannot make it through the first freakin' paragraph of this, much less the second.
> 
> Upon reflection, I think the problem was I was writing for a character I didn't particularly like at the time, in a genre/trope that I'd didn't particularly like at the time and had never done before, in a happy tone that my miserable angsty self wasn't familiar with writing, and on top of all this I did this in about two weeks, which I felt pretty neat about at the time and now im just like. hey. past me. dont. time is our friend. not food. anyway it was a gift and they enjoyed it at the time so its served its purpose more or less. but i cant delete the bastard because. there are like nine works in the entire ap tag. and this is currently the second longest. 
> 
> Old summary:  
> Most people got their colors years ago. Sean Darcy never did. He _did_ get a career in espionage. And he's _also_ about to catch a thief.
> 
> Old Additional Tags:  
> freelancer!Thorton × Soulmate Color AU × Spies & Secret Agents 
> 
> AU where you start getting your colors the first time you see your soulmate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: idk if i ever actually said this in the notes but im pretending AP is located above ground like a normal place for once.

The Corvette rolled down the street for the third time, polish shining ostentatiously in the sunlight. Sean paused the security tape, flipped to an empty page in his notebook off the desk.

_1401 – Nascar cruising the street again. Racerback nowhere to be seen. Hope she dumped him._

Westridge wouldn’t like the nicknames. Or the comments. Then again, Sean doubted he was going to sift through all four of the notebooks himself. Industrial espionage didn’t rank high on Alpha Protocol’s list of priorities. Usually.

And yet here it was, 04:00, and Sean was up watching business people leave their offices and go to lunch, leave lunch and go to work, over and over and over again. _Our thief is on those tapes, Sean._ Yeah, sure. But those cameras had recorded weeks and weeks of footage, and the victimized company being a security firm, well, they kept _everything-_

Sean pulled his feet off his desk, rummaged around in one of the side drawers. Found the worn-out box of colored pencils and teased a grey one marked RED free. Yeah, the thief was there, alright. But the chance of finding them?

He tapped the pencil against the car on the screen. The grey tones of the pencil and the grey of the car’s body paint melded perfectly together.

On a scale of 1 to the end of the world, how bad was low-grade industrial espionage, really? When you sat down and thought about it?

He looked back at his notes. Westy wouldn’t like the nicknames. Not professional.

He crossed the note out and starting writing with the red pencil.

 _1401._ He used his best and most official handwriting. _License 1DRVF457_ _making another circuit._

Better.

 

* * *

 

 _“Darcy!”_ someone said.

Mm? he said calmly.

Someone made a harrumphing noise, and jabbed at his shoulder.

Then he woke up. Nearly fell out of his chair, a grenade in hand – no, his mouse-

His keyboard was on the ground.

 _Why_ was his keyboard on the ground?

His jaw hurt.

“Mrrphrphl,” he said, because he didn’t feel like figuring out words and anyone who’d woken him up didn’t deserve them anyway.

Mina sighed, and rolled her eyes. Well didn’t _she_ look like the picture of actually-got-sleep-tonight. Not so much as a single hair straying from her static grey ponytail or a wrinkle in her black wool sweater.

“Not that I care,” she said, hands on her side, “but are you okay?”

That didn’t deserve any words, either.

She ran her eyes over his office. Judging him. A keyboard on the ground, one of his notebooks splayed out beside it. Mouse hanging off the desk, the security tape still playing on his monitor. And a stack of unfinished paperwork on the one spare chair, the pile looking like it was about to fall over any second. Admittedly, things weren’t great. Plus, the hard white light from the hallway was making the shadows fuzzy and sharp in all the wrong places, and at some point he’d dropped his pack of colored pencils, and they spilled over the ground-

“Because you were shouting, and-” Mina began saying.

He looked at the pencils. He remembered now.

He’d been having a nightmare.

Everything had looked wrong. The whites had hurt too much. The darks slid around and faded, and the world’s gradient had fractured apart like someone had burned lines around everything. It had only been a dream. It would have been fine, except he was looking down at the pencils all over the floor, and getting the same unsteady feeling that something was significantly _wrong_ in his universe, and he couldn’t tell why or where it came from, but looking down he was getting dizzy and it was getting worse the longer he looked, not that he could, he couldn’t focus on them, tried and his vision veered off and centered in on the soft grey of the unpatterned carpet.

“Hey!” Mina waved a hand in front of his face. And like that, things were normal again.

“What?” he bit back.

She seemed almost as surprised as he was by the hostility in his voice. He didn’t apologize. That, he’d never live down. Not from her, at any rate.

She gave him a chance anyway, and when he smirked at her instead, returned to her usual cold tone.

“Westridge wants to see you,” she reported. “You’ve been ignoring your phone.”

Then, with a final disdainful glance around his office, she added, “If you can find it in this mess, I’d suggest picking it up next time.”

 

 

Sean dropped all four cursive-filled spiral-bound notebooks on Westridge’s desk, dangerously close to his stainless-steel coffee mug.

“In conclusion,” Sean concluded, “we got nothin’.”

“You don’t got nothing,” Yancy said, hands clasped behind his back. He looked tense.

“You’re right,” Sean offered. “I _do_ have a headache. Thanks.”

“Sir,” he added, because it was always guaranteed to annoy him.

Except it didn’t. Instead of looking up from the notebooks, glaring across the desk and suggesting they put another agent on this, he relaxed. Smiled the smile of a guy who did _not_ have smile lines. He nodded briefly at Sean.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I think I’m gonna help you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Sean said, immediately regretting whatever life choice had led to this point. Westridge didn’t help. His middle name was NO BACKUP.

Yancy smiled even more broadly.

“Agent Hartford pulled in a freelancer this morning, with some intel you might find useful.”

“A _freelancer-”_

“I think _you_ should do the debrief,” Westridge continued. “Lotta paperwork – you’re good with paperwork, right?”

Sean bit his tongue as hard as he could without letting the motion show.

“Westridge,” he said. “Look. I’m sorry about the phone thing, and-”

“Agent Darcy,” Westridge interrupted, smile still resting on his face. “This isn’t a _punishment_. You’ve been doin’ a real good job on this case, and you’re one of our best agents. I think you’re the natural choice for handlin’ our newest asset. It’s an _opportunity_ for you.”

“Westridge-” Sean tried.

“Sir,” he corrected. “Dismissed.”

 

 

A freelancer. A _freelancer._ Don’t let them be a bounty hunter with a trumped-up sense of their own importance. Hours sorting out what they knew from what they thought they knew. _Or worse,_ he thought as he walked. They could be some international spook with an attitude. Or a wide-eyed security guard who though he saw a ‘shady character’ but oops! No, that was some wind in the bushes.

He’d had to say sir, hadn’t he?

Agent Hartford was standing outside of an interrogation room, arms crossed, a stun gun prominently displayed on her hip. She looked bored. It didn’t spell good news.

 _“Please_ tell me this isn’t going to ruin my week,” he asked as he walked up.

“Might,” she said.

She glanced through the glass. “Cagey bastard,” she added. “Don’t got much on him except civvy stuff from social media.”

The horror of having to deal with an untrained civilian right now must have shown on his face, because she shrugged at him.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I said don’t got _much_. He’s legit. More legit than usual, at any rate.”

He circled around her. The man was sitting with his back to the window, tapping out an uptempo rhythm on the table. Off-brand medium-grey longsleeve button down hanging loosely off him, too big for him. He was a lean dude, but tough. Freelancers – the legit ones – often had to be. He’d made an effort to tuck his shirt into his jeans. Not a very sincere effort - half of the back still hung out over his back pockets, very nice design on the pockets, that, and now that Sean was paying attention, nice jeans, too, much tighter than his shirt, and pulling in all the right places-

“Are you gonna stare at him all day,” Hartford interrupted, “or do you want the rundown?”

“I wasn’t staring at him.”

He had short stylized spikes of stubbornly fluffy hair, matte black, looked as if he'd just got out of bed and yet-

“You’re _still_ staring at him,” she pointed out.

“No I’m not,” he said, acutely aware of how very much he suddenly needed to be running his fingers through the freelancer’s hair.

“Paperwork,” she said.

He spun around, snapped his focus back to her.

“What?”

“Well, that worked,” she said.

“What did?”

“You want the rundown, or not?”

Paperwork, that’s what she’d said.

A sobering thought.

He sighed.

“Yeah, gimme the rundown.”

“Claims he happened to be nearby during the break in. Says he saw a suspicious character fleeing from the scene. Says he chased him for a while, but the guy gave him the slip in traffic. Went on and on about how he nearly got hit by a Corvette, and how he hopes we appreciate his sacrifice. I think he wants more money. _Freelancers.”_

“He _saw_ the thief?”

“That’s what he says.”

Hours of security tapes melted away. Let him have seen the thief. Please let him have seen the thief.

And let him not be lying about it.

He was probably lying about it.

“What do we know about him?”

“The thief?” she asked. “That’s your department.”

“No, the…” He didn’t know the freelancer’s name. He gestured vaguely towards the window. “Him.”

“Michael?”

“Michael,” he repeated. The dude had stopped tapping, had started leaning back slightly in his chair instead, holding his balance at first with fingers gripping the edge of the table.

“Sorry,” Hartford said. “Michael _Thorton._ _Have_ to have the _full_ name. Have fun with spell-checking that.”

“What else?”

Michael let go of the table, looked like he was about to fall. Threw out his hands for balance, was wobbling like crazy but managed to keep upright. Sean didn’t want to think about the kind of core strength that took. He was thinking about it anyway.

“Like I said, not much. American, biracial. Born in Pennsylvania. Pretty patriotic, for a freelancer. Only cut one deal with foreign powers this year, that we know of. No significant debts. Seems to do this for the hell of it. Except a couple of times when he’s been on record helping the CIA with some overseas stuff.”

A freelancer? With a sense of duty?

“Any idea why he’s helping us now?” Sean asked, suspicion back.

“That’s your problem,” she said. “I’m not the one who pissed Westridge off again.”

“I didn’t piss him off,” he protested.

“Then why are you the one interviewing the freelancer?”

He didn’t have a good answer to that. And she knew it.

Michael was wobbling badly now, but he was refusing to grab the table. All of his muscles tense, trying to hang on-

It didn’t last. A split second later he fell backwards, hit the ground hard with a noise Sean couldn’t hear through the soundproofing, but could imagine.

On the ground, Michael blinked slowly, winced. Legs sprawled over the upturned chair, head resting against the concrete floor. He sat for a second, mouthing what looked like curses. Then he rubbed he head, looked around upside down, and met Sean’s eyes.

He waved.

Sean froze.

Michael’s eyes were shattered. That was the only word Sean could think of. They were bright, and stark, and impossible to look at but impossible to look away from. Sean wanted to call them bright white, but that wasn’t right because they _were_ bright white but they were deep black at the same time, and everything in-between all at once, they didn’t make sense and they hurt.

Hartford grabbed Sean’s arm

“Look,” she said sharply, “you wanna piss Westridge off, that’s one thing. But you don’t gotta bad cop this guy – he volunteered to help us.”

“What’s wrong with him?” he demanded.

She let go.

“What do you mean?” she asked lightly.

 _“What’s wrong with his-”_ he said, through clenched teeth. Then he made himself stop. And he made himself breathe. He’d been up too late these past few days. Not enough sleep. And Hartford was looking at him with actual concern.

“His eyes are weird,” he told her.

“Oh!” she said, and relaxed. “You looked like you were about to…I don’t know.”

She patted his shoulder awkwardly.

 “Yeah,” she said as he glared at her hand. “Right, yeah. No. Yeah, that guy’s got the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen on a person-”

She stopped.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said hastily. “I sometimes forget you don’t have, well…”

She gestured over her eyes.

Apparently, he hadn’t been glaring at her hard enough.

“Just because I don’t have colors, doesn’t mean I don’t know what they are.”

“Right,” she said again. “Well, he’s got unusual eyes, is all.”

Someone knocked on the window. Sean nearly jumped.

Michael waved again, tapped a finger against a light grey wristwatch.

Grey wristwatch. He could look at that.

Of course, the rest of Michael was fine. It was just his eyes, that were…whatever they were.

It wasn’t important. Leftovers from this morning’s bad dream. Or staring security tapes for too long. Double vision from filling out paperwork.

 _Green,_ a little voice inside him whispered.

“Anything else?” he asked Hartford one last time.

“No,” she said, and backed away from the door.

“Good.”

He grabbed the door handle.

“Uh,” she said, and he _knew_ what was coming, somehow, could _feel_ it.

“He _is_ single?” she offered, more awkwardly than she’d patted his arm.

God, he _hated_ working with spies.

“I have a migraine,” he lied. “Don’t go getting’ any ideas.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.”

“Yeah - right. And next time you see Westy, do me a favor?”

“What?” she asked, clearly more than happy to be free of whatever she thought had been happening.

“Tell him I hate him.”

“I’m not gonna do that.”

“Worth a try.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“Yes it was,” he said, and closed the door behind him without giving her a chance to argue back.

 

 

“‘Sup,” the freelancer said, and nodded.

Sean ignored him. Dropped a folder on the table, flipped it open. Wikipedia’s _List of helicopter prison escapes_ article, loving translated into Arabic. Plenty of charts, plenty of dates, looked mysterious and official and not to mention, a great read while waiting for freelancers to crack.

Michael fidgeted a little in his chair. “Uh,” he said.

“Hello?” he said a minute later.

“So, are we gonna talk, or…?” he said, a minute after that.

Sean flipped a page. Let the silence stand.

But instead of giving up and starting to ramble about whatever it was he’d seen, Michael leaned back.

“Alright then,” he said, and his voice had an edge to it. An edge that seemed to suggest this guy was sitting here, on Sean’s turf, seriously thinking he was gonna…what? Out-silence _Sean?_ And on any other day, he told himself, he would have been happy to educate the guy. But today was _not_ any other day, and the sooner Sean could get back to getting through with this case, the better.

Sean sat back in his own chair. Stacked his papers back up and closed the folder. Forced himself to look away from the article and meet the freelancer’s eyes.

Speaking was a lot harder than he’d anticipated. The guy’s eyes were _glowing._ Or something. Almost like they were alive.

 _Green,_ the little voice mentioned again, and-

He shook the thought away.

“Alright, Mikey, lemme tell ya what’s gonna happen today. I’m Sean Darcy,” he said, pointing at himself. _“You_ are gonna run everything ya know by me. If I think it’s any good, I’ll send you upstairs to bargain with the boss. You lie to us, and-”

“I’m not here to lie to you guys,” Michael interrupted. “Or to get paid. I just wanna help.”

“Mm _hm,_ ” Sean said. “Well, in case you feel like changin’ your mind, I’m morally obligated to let ya know - the _last_ guy who messed with us ended up getting fished out of the septic tank of a 747. _Not_ a fun trip.”

If the example bothered Michael, he didn’t show it. He leaned over the table instead, glanced around quickly.

“You ever been hunted by the Russian mafia?” he whispered, his voice low, and slow, and conspiratorial.

When Sean didn’t say anything, he grinned.

“‘Cause I have,” he continued, still whispering. “And the Triads. And guess who’s still standing? My point being-”

His voice got even lower, and even more quiet, so much so that Sean found himself leaning in despite himself.

“-if I didn’t want you guys to find me, you wouldn’t. And if _– if –_ I wanted to lie to you…you would _never-fucking-know._ ”

“Got it?” he asked brightly, straightening up.

“Got it,” Sean said. He was a little abstractly proud of how unimpressed he’d managed to sound. He was far less delighted with how hard it was to ignore the odd reflective glint the hard lights in the room were casting across Michael’s eyes. Also hard to ignore how the white of the lights was significantly different from the…from the…he didn’t know what else to call it but the color of Michael’s eyes but that was a ridiculous idea, because, yes. Admittedly, something was wrong with Sean’s vision today. But this was probably a perfectly normal problem, and even on the wild off chance that it wasn’t (it wasn’t), even then, Michael was just some freelancer. Sean had been having problems since this morning. With his luck, he’d probably seen the goddamn thief on the tapes. Wouldn’t that be the talk of the office? _Sean’s finally found his soulmate, guys, but get this – he’s an international criminal._

He felt strangely cold thinking about it.

He’d schedule an appointment with – he didn’t know. An optometrist. Or a neurologist. You know what? Both. That’s what he’d do.

 _He_ is _single,_ Hartford had said.

“Uh,” Michael said. Had he been talking? And Sean had let himself get caught up in his own thoughts. There was _definitely_ something wrong with his head.

“Yes,” Sean guessed.

“O-kay,” Michael said. “What do you wanna know about him?”

“You can start,” he said, scrambling for a thing to say.

“You can start with,” he said, and his notes weren’t helping, because it turns out his notes were an article about helicopter escapes?

“What did his eyes look like?” he asked, in what was perhaps his best display of skill as an operative to date.

“His eyes,” Michael repeated with a brief frown.

“Yes. Yeah. Yeah, y’know. Description of the guy? Pretty basic question, Mikey.” Sean felt unbalanced. He added a smirk for good measure. “You _did_ see him, right?”

“I…yeah? But I already gave a sketch to the other agent.”

“You draw?” he asked, in his head seeing an image of Michael bent over a desk, dark charcoal pencils scattered over sheets of paper, lines of concentration and focus tight over his face.

“Is that relevant?”

“Could be,” he said, and then he himself appeared in the picture, walking up behind Michael and wrapping an arm around him, looking over the drawings.

“A little?”

“We can trust the sketch, then,” he said, because that was a plausible explanation for why it was relevant.

“Of course you can.”

“So you saw the guy?”

“I don’t _mind_ answering the same question over and over again,” Michael said, waving a hand through the air, “but we probably both have better things to do.”

Did he? He did.

The camera in the room was recording all of this, he’d be able to get a transcript later. But he needed to get out of his head, and more importantly, he really needed to stop looking at Michael. Sean grabbed his article, dug a pen out of his pocket, and started taking studious notes in the margins.

“What was he doing?”

“Robbing the building. Thought you guys already knew that.”

“What was he doing _specifically?_ ”

“Well,” Michael said, “he came out of a side door. The alarms and everything? You could hear them once he opened the door. That’s actually what got my attention. This dude was carrying an AK-47. You _might_ be able to track that, though I’m guessing you’ll have a hell of a time. Anyway, he looked up and saw me, which, I seriously thought I was about to get shot. But he took off down the alley instead.”

“Hartford said you chased him.”

 _“Yeah_ I did. And this asshole in a-”

“-Corvette, I know.”

Michael frowned.

“She stole the best part.”

“You nearly got hit?”

“Nearly!” he said, sounding scandalized. “Is _that_ what she said?”

“I take it you don’t agree with her.”

“Don’t _agree!_ I-” he spluttered. He yanked a sleeve up, and plunked his arm down on the table. “Nearly my ass.”

Okay. He’d just look very quickly.

And then the distraction was gone, replaced by a surge of anger. Huge, deep, blotchy bruises coated the top of Michael’s arm, dark black and mottled grey things that stretched from his wrist up to where they disappeared up under his bunched-up sleeve. Short scabbed-over cuts crisscrossed on top of all of it, tearing up the soft grey of his skin, and there remained one large pale bandage tight around the top part of his forearm. For a moment Sean was having trouble finding words that were strong enough to describe the person who did this to him, the _fucker_ who had _dared_ to do this to _my_ Michael-

And then the distraction back. Michael wasn’t his. Sean wasn’t sure where that had come from.

And then the distraction taking over, because, with a shock that was almost worse than the anger, he realized the bruises weren’t entirely black and grey. Or the strange blend of both that made up Michael’s (green) eyes. It was a painful, burning, livid kind of…darkish grey? But that wasn’t right.

In fact, the shade reminded Sean of the Corvette itself.

 _Red_ , the part of him that kept going on about green offered.

“And it’s not just my goddamn arm,” Michael was complaining. He grabbed the side of his shirt with his other hand. “He hit-”

“I get it,” Sean said quickly. He could feel his nails against his palms.

 “Well,” Michael said, letting go of his shirt, “I would have come in a lot sooner, but…”

He wiggled his elbow.

“Had to take care of this.”

“Of course.”

Michael looked up, perhaps a little alarmed by the venom in Sean’s tone.

“Uh…it’s not that bad, you know. Looks worse than it feels.”

“Sure it doesn’t. I got the guy’s license plate number if you want it.”

 _“1DRVF457,”_ Michael rattled off, then smiled gently. “It’s really not _that_ bad.”

Michael was trying to make Sean feel better, he realized. As if he was the one who needed it.

Sean went back to his notes.

“What happened next?”

He could feel Michael’s eyes watching as he pressed far too hard on the page, but Michael didn’t say anything about it. Good.

“I chased him down the alley, got… _encountered_ the Corvette, and then he got away.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yeah…I’m pretty fast myself,” Michael said, no trace of bragging. “But this guy was faster. Seemed trained, a sprinter, probably. Might help you narrow your list down.”

 _If we_ had _one, it might help_ , he thought.

“Alright,” he said. “Agent Hartford’s gonna run you through some NDAs, send you up to look at some tapes, and then you’ll be done.”

“Tapes,” he said, eyebrows shooting up.

The goddamn tapes.

“Yeah, the security tapes.”

_Green. Red. Our thief is on those tapes, Sean._

Wouldn’t that be just his luck, though?

“There are tapes,” Michael repeated.

Sean sighed. Yes, there were tapes. And reviewing them with the sole witness would save him hours of work. That would be the responsible thing to do. The right thing to do.

 _“You_ know what he looks like,” Sean explained. _“We_ have him somewhere on tape. We’ll fast-forward, you can I.D. him, and we’ll take it from there.”

“Great,” Michael grumbled. He somehow managed to look less excited about the prospect than Sean felt.

“Don’t worry,” Sean offered. “You’re still gonna get paid.”

“That’s not- I just want to help.”

“Then you sit tight. Hartford will be here in a sec, and then you can help all ya want.”

“Sounds great,” he said glumly.

Sean glanced back at him. A quick flash of tension ran across Michael’s shoulders, so fast it couldn’t possibly have been there.

Though he had hit his head pretty hard.

“You should get that checked out,” Sean said, tapping the side of his own forehead. “Doesn’t take a lot to mess with your head.”

“Don’t I know it,” he muttered, and the tension was there again, and then gone again.

He could have been referring to a lot of different things. Injuries from the Corvette. Forgot his coffee in the morning. Just a general acknowledgement of how fragile people were.

Alternatively – _alternatively_ …the slow switch from greyscale to color was, Sean heard…well it could mess with you.

It wasn’t Michael, Sean reminded himself. There wasn’t _anyone._ This vision thing was stress.

And if it wasn’t stress, then whomever they were…they were on the tapes.

If Michael had been there, he might be on the tapes.

No. Too much of a coincidence. Too many coincidences all in one. And it was just stress.

Sean had one foot out the door when Michael called back, “By the way. Forgot your helicopter article.”

And his notes. So the freelancer was bilingual. Of course he was. Sean had to cross the entirely of the room to go get the papers. Michael was not watching him. He was contemplating the camera in the corner of the room instead. Didn’t even glance over at Sean. It didn’t mean anything.

At least, that’s what he tried to tell himself.

 

 

Sean was spinning around in his chair, pausing every few seconds to send a glare over at the images on his monitor, when he heard the sound of pleasant laughter outside his door. And then, surprisingly, _Mina_ laughing.

She knocked on the door. “Darcy, I brought Michael.”

 _Michael?_ Mina was on a last name basis with everyone in the world, as far as Sean knew.

He pulled out a notebook, this one in Spanish, this time. Plucked a black pen off his desk and pretended to look busy.

“It’s open,” he called.

She walked in with him, both of them chattering and Mina just bubbling over and certainly with the happy note in Michael’s voice he was smiling but Sean had important notes to study and no time to look up and check.

 _She’s already_ got _her soulmate,_ he wrote, and immediately felt bad about it, and then felt bad about feeling bad about it, and the sooner this was over, the better.

“I’ll grab you a chair,” Mina said, laughter trailing off into general disapproval as she sent another pointed look towards the stacks of paperwork covering Sean’s spares.

Michael waved her off. “I’m good. This won’t take long, right?”

“I _hope_ not,” Sean thought. It was only when Mina and Michael turned to stare at him in unison that he realized he’d said it out loud.

“He’s not feeling well,” Mina whispered over his head, like she and Michael were already confidantes, like Sean wasn’t even there. And he would have said something about it, right then and there, screw the usual dragged-out retribution, but Michael had said, _Really?_ and instead of sarcasm or even concern, it almost seemed…interested? Hopeful? Hopeful that maybe, Sean was going through exactly what he was?

“I could do this in my sleep.”

“I know; I woke you up this morning, remember?”

This morning, when he’d fallen asleep watching the tapes and woke up with his colored pencils doing the same thing as Michael’s eyes.

He could have fought back with her. Honesty, he felt like it, he was annoyed and tired and ill. She’d started it, after all.

But Michael was standing there, gaze flipping between them.

And the tapes were paused on his screen.

“Yeah, I was,” he said instead, calmly. “Anything else ya need?”

Now _she_ was glancing back and forth quickly. This was worse.

“I should go,” she said suddenly, and disappeared, leaving Sean with Michael, and way too many tapes with a thief trapped somewhere on them, and possibly the colors green and red. He switched back over to the monitor, spent a second setting the tapes up to play one after another, 10x speed until they found the right day, and from then on, they’d see.

“I like her,” Michael said thoughtfully.

“Don’t worry about her. We take care of this, you don’t have a reason to get stuck here again.”

Sean could feel eyes on his neck. Or was he imagining that?

“I wouldn’t mind one,” Michael said a heartbeat later.

No. He _hadn’t_ been imagining that.

He pressed play on the tapes, pretended he hadn’t heard Michael say anything. Pretended he didn’t notice when the pressure of Michael’s green eyes lifted. He placed a hand on Sean’s desk, leaned over to get a better view of the screen. The image of Michael working on his sketches, but reversed. Michael’s head was almost level with Sean’s, his other hand in his pocket, all he had to do was take it out and reach across the back of Sean’s chair-

“There,” Michael said simply, the hand that had been in his pocket now pointing at someone on screen.

“What?” Sean asked.

“Roll it back.”

He clicked back a few seconds, then frame by frame until Michael touched the screen.

“That guy.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Sean didn’t want to look. He _did not_ want to look. But he did anyway.

Above Michael’s finger, a small figure sat at the table of a sidewalk café. A spy in businessman’s clothing. The man didn’t look fast. He didn’t look like anything in particular. A bundle of grey skin and a grey sports jacket and trimmed grey hair. Not a trace of red, or green, or any other color.

Not that Sean had expected to find any. Not _really._ Not with Michael some three inches away from him, so close that if Sean moved, they’d collide.

He relaxed. He _felt_ himself relaxing. And now that he was, he felt safe admitting to himself he hadn’t been before. So what if the odds had seemed astronomical at times? So what if his friends had one by one starting doing things like putting sprinkles on cakes, or picking out paint for their living rooms, or buying colored lights for the holidays? So what if seemed crazy?

Michael was his soulmate. He tried the sentence out in his head, felt ridiculous even thinking it, ridiculous and giddy all at the same time, but first-

First he’d better check.

Just in case.

“So that’s it, huh?” he said.

He could feel Michael smiling without looking over but this time, he wanted to anyway and so he did.

Michael _was_ smiling. A small, happy one that crinkled the corners of his very green eyes.

“I mean, if you wanna check a few more days, I’m game.”

“Thought you had better things to do.”

“Not anymore I don’t,” Michael swore, and Sean felt like giggling, which was not a thing he’d _ever_ done, or would ever have been caught _dead_ doing, but he also felt a little lightheaded. Might have had something to do with it. Had everything to do with it. He needed to sit down.

Oh. He _was_ sitting down.

“You okay?” Michael asked, with the faintest trace of concern.

“You kidding me?” he said. “First, though, and this is just for paperwork and everything, my boss is a real stickler for protocol, and it won’t take long, but we gotta find you on here.”

“That’s going to be easy,” Michael said. “I’m _not_ there.”

“What?”

Sean wasn’t hearing him correctly.

“You’re talking about on _those_ tapes, right? There aren’t any others?”

“No,” he said, and now he _definitely_ felt dizzy.

“Then we’re done.”

“Are you _sure,”_ Sean said, very carefully, because he wasn’t quite sure if his mouth was moving. “Are you _certain_ that you aren’t on those tapes? Because you haven’t looked at them all.”

“They all from this angle?”

Sean nodded.

“Then, no. I wasn’t at any of those places, so I’m definitely not on camera.”

“Yes you are,” was all he could think to say, because if Michael wasn’t on camera, and if his eyes were in fact green, if, if, but Sean had first starting seeing color in the morning, after the tapes, way before he met Michael in person-

“No, I’m not,” Michael insisted, sounding upset now.

Sean couldn’t talk. He shook his head, or his head was shook itself, because he wasn’t moving it. He wasn’t sure if he _could_ move.

Michael wasn’t smiling anymore. A frown was settling on top of his eyebrows. “No, I’m _not,”_ he said again.

Then all the lights and all the electricity shut off simultaneously.

Sean should have been reaching for the gun in his desk drawer, but it was currently under a bunch of colored pencils he hadn’t reboxed, and any ability to move he’d had before realizing this fact deserted him. Michael reflexively reached for where he must have usually kept a weapon holstered. When his hand found nothing, he started cursing in some Slavic language. Russian, from the sound of it. Multilingual, not bilingual, Sean mentally corrected. Probably spoke Spanish too, why wouldn’t he? Michael moved silently through the room, grabbing hold of the door handle. What was he planning on doing? Slamming the door into some enemy agent’s face? Like they wouldn’t just shoot first and ask questions later?

A shotgun blast tearing through the door and Michael falling over on the carpet. The thought flashed across Sean’s mind, and he could move again. He’d just gotten his gun in his hand when all the lights came back on, and the phone in his pocket started vibrating wildly.

Westridge was speaking the moment he answered.

“Darcy, check your-”

 _Files,_ he thought without needing to hear the rest of it, he was already back in his seat, realizing too late that while the lights had come back on his computer hadn’t.

He got the computer powered up. Michael was behind him, turned his head away slightly when Sean had to do his login, not that it mattered, he would have done it anyway because there wasn’t time. He had a horrible feeling about what he would find as soon as the screen loaded.

He skipped checking the essential files. Essential, what a joke. There was one set of files that mattered to him right now, and he clicked his way to where the security tapes were.

Rather, where the tapes _had_ been.

“Yeah, they took some files,” he reported to Westridge.

“Which ones?”

“I-” he said, could feel Michael hovering behind him. “I can’t talk about it. I’m with the freelancer.”

Westridge choked on the idea of an outsider being party to the situation for a moment.

“Get rid of him,” he finally ordered, “and report to ops.”

“Got it.”

He disconnected. Sat. Breathed.

Michael broke the silence after about a minute.

“I think you lost some files.”

“Yep,” Sean said.

“Was this an important case?”

“No. Not really.”

“You seem upset.”

“I’m not,” he said, and once he said it, it was true. He was not upset. It was… This was…

Michael didn’t believe him either.

“Look, if this is about your boss, I was in and out of a couple places that day, I can check if _they_ have security tapes, but…”

“Don’t bother,” he said.

Michael followed him to the door. Sean wasn’t sure when he’d stood up.

Mina was outside, rushing down the hallway.

“Hey.” He waved at her, and she paused with a clear look of annoyance taking over.

“What, Darcy?”

“Can you…he…”

Sean gestured vaguely over his shoulder.

“Westridge needs me,” he lied.

“So? We’re _all_ very busy.”

“The lobby’s on the way,” he said, though he wasn’t sure where she was going.

“The what?” Michael asked.

“Standard protocol,” Mina explained, studying the conspicuous absence of a smirk or a grin or even so much as a hint of challenge from Sean. “Visitors have to leave after…incidents like this.”

“Leave? But – hey!”

Sean stop walking, turned back to face the two. Mina crossing her arms, but not refusing to help, either. Michael, not seeming sure who he was supposed to be following or what was happening.

“Are you _sure,”_ Sean asked, allowing nothing but professionalism take over the question, even though the effort of doing so made it hard to remember why he was even asking, “that you, Michael Thorton, are _not_ on those security tapes?”

“I swear,” he said. Confusion filling his eyes.

Green eyes. Duly noted.

“Alright, then,” Sean said, and walked off.

Mina would help Michael. She wouldn’t let him get any deeper into the facility, at any rate. Which meant she wouldn’t let him follow Sean. And that was good enough.

 

He wasn’t sure where he was headed, until he reached one of the back exits. He fished his ID out of his pocket, unwound the lanyard. Scanned it, registered his passcode, submitted his thumbprint for inspection, and then he was free. He only met one guard while wandering to his car, and he was friends with her, so she didn’t think twice about whatever lie he’d given her. If Westridge was upset about Sean’s absence, he didn’t hear about it. He disassembled his phone at a stop light, almost dropped it out the window on the highway but the effort it would have taken to unglue his hands from the wheel, open the window, and chuck it without losing control of anything he judged to be too much. He made it home without tossing it. Made it into the house without tossing it, up the porch stairs, through the living room and into his bedroom, and then he thought about getting up and throwing it in the trash, but he was tired, so he went to bed instead.

 

* * *

 

Sean's suspension lasted a month. It only took one week to get the rest of his colors.

Blue came first. Several days of it, dark blues and light blues and something someone called navy blue. The color denim and the colors of the sky. The sky – he thought he’d been prepared for that. All the psych books he’d torn into during the college years warned that the sky tended to be highly disorienting. And when he’d seen the first strain of blue on one of his coffee mugs, he’d sat down and tried to remember everything those books had said. He’d still ended up walking out the front door and stopping, staring up at the blue and the blue and the blue and the fact that not a single one of those blues had been the same. He’d been stuck for an hour, and then two, and he might had stayed there like that all day if a passerby on a bike hadn’t seen him, and with a knowing smile, took his hand and sat him down on the grass. She came back a minute later, armed with an old blanket. Said it was much better if you watched it laying down, because you could get just an awful crick in the neck otherwise.

 _It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it?_ she’d said.

And as much as he’d wanted to disagree, the blue above him was so entirely overwhelming, he found himself nodding along. The only thing he’d managed to get done that day was a short trip to the store. Bought the biggest pack of colored pencils they had and learned the names of the sky one by one. _Periwinkle. Cyan. Teal._ The blues that merged their way into the reds, and the ones that blended with the greens.

After blue came yellow, and then pinks, and browns. And then he’d stopped being able to differentiate, because every new shade he could find hidden within the other ones. It was like a game. What is _vermilion,_ and where does it come from? There were the other rare colors. One day, he challenged himself to find ten gold things, and jewelry didn’t count. There were the colors that refused to change, as well. Is that car actually grey, or was he missing something?

So, week one spent on getting colors.

Week two spent using them as a distraction.

After all, the tapes were gone and there was no reason to think about them. Why bother about that when – look! No one had ever said anything about the living room rug. But it’s neon orange and lime green! That explained why it had been discounted. Time to get a new one. Cantaloupes are pale watery orange. Does that change how they taste? No? What about other food? And what does red taste like? Grapefruits, cranberries. Red is related to purple – try a plum. And if that’s no good go get something else. Anything to not think about the thing you aren’t thinking about. Your walls are white and boring. Splatter paint them. Regret it. Repaint and let the house smell like fumes for a few hours because that’s a distraction, all right. Set up a complicated plan of fans to fix the air flow and when it works a little too well, and the house smells like nothing again, remember what you were trying to avoid. The tapes are gone, and there was no getting them back.

Week three spent trying to get copies of the tape anyway.

The security firm had already turned everything over. Nothing left. The stores near the building have standard security systems. But no one has tapes going that far back. Wander around the streets for a while. Businesspeople are creatures of habit, after all. Rub your eyes constantly, because everyone is in grey, the ties or blouses the only patches of color. Really start to doubt yourself when an AP agent detaches from the black shadows, intercepts you on the street, kindly reminds you that you are on suspension, _total_ suspension, and Westridge would be more than happy to extend it.

Week four.

Cancel the optometrist. Cancel the neurologist. Facts are facts: you can see color now.

On day five of week four, he resolved to say it out loud until it sounded natural.

“I have a soulmate,” he said, while eating breakfast.

“I have a soulmate,” he told the TV while checking the news.

 _“I have a soulmate,”_ he whispered up at a night sky that only a month ago, he’d known as black and grey with little white stars.

It didn’t sound right.

But facts were facts.

On day six of week four, it caught him. During sunrise, a moment of unguarded appreciation for the blend of deep night blue-black and rich purple and careful morning pinks and oranges and then back to light blue, a completely different blue from the base of the sky. A spare glance out of the window at the sun rising through the trees, and the fear that had been darkening over the month snuck in and caught him.

_You’ll never find them._

Sean had seen his soulmate, but he’d seen them on the tapes. Which meant they hadn’t seen Sean in return. Which meant they didn’t even _know._ Didn’t even know to be _looking_.

 _What if the same thing happens to them? They see you, don’t know, can’t find out, get_ their _colors and then what?_

Impossible to find one another after that point.

Such things happened, occasionally. There were stories, sad songs and sad books and sad movies about soulmates who’d come _this_ close but had misplaced one another, somehow. It happened. But to other people. It wasn’t supposed to happen to him.

None of this was.

His friends – happy, matched up, soulmates all of them – had once claimed that Sean would find someone someday. Time had passed, and then they’d started saying well lots of people were happy anyway, without a soulmate. And _then_ they’d started saying, well, you know, there are entire cultures that don’t even _care_ about the whole soulmate-color thing. And then he’d finally gotten them to shut up about it. It wasn’t supposed to happen to him – fine. Then it wasn’t. They didn’t have to go on and on about it.

And really, Sean was in the same boat as he’d always been. It wasn’t supposed to happen. It _still_ wasn’t supposed to happen. The only difference was now he knew what sunrise looked like.

A pretty good deal, right? All things considered. He missed the colors of his world before but this was nice, yeah?

Day seven of week four was much worse than he’d wanted it to be. Last day of suspension – he’d wanted to relax. Go on a walk. Take the Whitworth out for once. Take the _Tesla_ out, for once. He’d also planned on sleeping. Instead he woke up in the middle of the night, tangled in blankets, half-asleep but so certain someone was missing that he couldn’t keep his eyes closed, much less get back to sleep. There was a gap in his room. The air felt strange, too light. He had the faintest memory of holding someone; the longer he was awake, the further the feeling faded, until finally all that was left was an inability to lay anywhere on the bed without feeling like something was wrong. His arms were out of place. They were jamming into his sides, or else stuck out at odd angles. Sleeping in the bedroom was impossible; the couch was easier, until he’d woken up a few hours later on the ground.

 _Somewhere out there,_ he thought, staring up at the ceiling fan, _my soulmate is sleeping just fine and doesn’t even know I exist._

The only person he could picture was Michael, ensconced in a comforter somewhere, smiling, asleep in a happy dream.

It just wasn’t meant to be.

It wasn’t supposed to happen.

And that _did_ sound right. He counted the repetitions off in his head, reached a hundred then lost track, and when he woke up it was noon and the day was half over and it was raining. No walk. No Whitworth. And of all the goddamn things, he forgot to charge the damn Tesla. Homebound, counting off the seconds until he could finally get back to doing something more important than staring at his new beige rug.

Work day tomorrow. He skipped sleeping on the sofa. Fell asleep hugging a pillow instead, and he felt stupid doing it, but it was a work day tomorrow and he wasn’t getting suspended for shoddy work on the first day back, which meant sleeping was a necessity.

And things would look better in the morning. They usually did.


	2. Chapter 2

**[Two months later]**

Sean tugged his boots off and sat them next to the door. Logically, there was no reason for sand to be on his socks, and yet there it was, falling on to the carpet. He’d clean it up later.

 _No_ , he mentally commanded himself. _Do it now._

Sweeping it out into the hallway took another five minutes, and he was jetjagged and tired and his feet hurt, but the effort was worth it. The office back to being spotless. Clean white walls. An extra pair of stubby square black leather chairs that had been...temporarily rerouted from their journey to Westridge’s office. All the paperwork gone and the new carpet solid slate grey, like he’d asked. The room clean and sans the extra chaos colors could cause when messes accumulated. He’d worked hard to return to something like monochromatic balance in his office and he wasn’t going to let grainy goldenrod bits of Saudi Arabian sand mess it up.

He sank back into his desk chair. Safe at home at last.

He’d gotten twenty-two URGENT emails since he’d last checked. Debriefing hadn’t been _that_ long.

He stretched back. Leave it for a second. They could take care of themselves.

Someone knocked lightly on his door. Leave that too. Not his problem.

_Knockknock._

_Not my problem._

The footsteps that walked away were familiar, though he couldn’t place them. Soft, but measured, and practiced. Like someone trained in how to make their sound disappear, even if they weren’t interested in using that training at the moment. Light but distinct. Even.

If they were trained, they could _definitely_ take care of themselves. Leave it.

The footsteps paused. He could barely hear them through the door anymore. Then they turned around, and came back.

Sean gritted his teeth together. _Don’t do it._

They didn’t. Sean waited for the inevitable. They stood there. Then, the sound of someone sliding down the wall, settling on to the floor and tapping irrhythmically against the wall.

Someone was camping outside his door.

Someone was actually camping outside _his_ door.

So, some new agent hadn’t gotten around to familiarizing themselves with the rules, had they? Junior agents did not camp outside of senior agents’ doors. He’d let ‘em _think_ they were off the hook, and then he’d correct the problem later. Get put on their training detail, maybe. Dole out the suitable amount of hell.

He opened the door.

Michael Thorton looked up at him.

“Hey,” he said, breaking out into a smile and getting up off the floor. “I didn’t know you were in.”

Sean looked up the hallway. Then he looked back down. Nobody else was there.

“They said debriefing might run a little long,” said Michael.

Sean blinked. Michael didn’t disappear. Looked much the same as he had the first time they’d met, except in a fitted aquamarine short sleeve shirt, the bruises on his arm completely gone. His hair was a little longer. And he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. The smile covered the traces of tired, though.

“What are you doing here?” Sean finally managed.

“Westridge sent me to review the new lead.”

“Westridge sent you.”

“Yeah.”

He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world that he should just be out there in the hallway, outside of Sean’s office, on Westridge’s orders, Michael Thorton in the middle of Alpha Protocol standing around unsupervised.

“To review the new lead.”

“Yep.”

“On the…?”

“You didn’t check your email?”

Clearly Sean had missed something. Or he’d finally lost it.

Michael inspected Sean for a moment. His eyes were as green as they’d ever been _(kiwi, neon, radioactive)_ , so much so Sean wondered how he’d ever doubted his colors. But they also had faint traces of scarlet running through the corners.

“You don’t know,” he said. The frown was fast but it hit something inside Sean. Didn’t know what?

“Mina thought you might not have noticed,” Michael added under his breath.

“Noticed what?” And why – scratch that, _how_ had Michael been in contact with Mina? Sean had spent most of his time outside Alpha Protocol the past two months, but that would have been major. Right?

“I’ll explain on the way,” he said. “We might have time to catch him.”

“Catch who?”

“Your thief. Well, the one who stole your tapes, anyway. I went out and found him for you guys. Free of charge.”

When Sean didn’t move, Michael grabbed his arm. It felt like someone setting off nitrocellulose flash paper on his skin.

“Come on,” he said, and pulled Sean out of a stunned silence. “We gotta move it.”

 

 

Michael worked for Alpha Protocol now. Sean couldn’t believe it. Michael couldn’t seem to believe it either, had kept insisting that he was only doing a few odd jobs here and there. But Sean knew Westridge better than Michael did. He was as good as recruited already. Sean had wanted to ask _why_ Michael was working here, but when a pause in conversation came up, he couldn’t figure out how to. Michael had smiled awkwardly at him, and Sean had gone back to quizzing him about the details of the meeting today. The guy was supposed to be meeting a buyer for something else later in the day, and had to retrieve a flashdrive, a CD, _something_ – Michael hadn’t known, but he had said the guy stored all his stuff in one place, and if the tapes were anywhere, they were there.

“I hope they help you. With your case.” Michael had said. Sean hadn’t answered. Truth be told, he didn’t believe they _would_ be there. But he was out in the Tesla, breezing quietly down the highway, it was a hot and sunny afternoon and the sky was fantastically blue, the kind of light blue that you could never be quite sure wouldn’t just float away and take the sky with it. And more than that, Michael was sitting in the passenger’s seat, elbow resting on the open window, wind mussing up his jet-black hair, and that was good enough.

The building, though, was horrible. Run down with grey-brown grime gathering at the bottom of the bricks, a cracked-up parking lot with broken glass every few feet.

“We’d better ditch your car for now,” Michael had suggested as they drove by, then threw up his hands in surrender at the sight of the look Sean had given him.

“Okay, okay. We’d better carefully remove your car from the vicinity for now. Better?”

They’d made their way on foot, only a minute away when they’d heard the gunshots. The front door was heavy, sturdy, Sean didn’t think he could have kicked it down but Michael undid the locks smoothly. Inside, the air was thick with swirling dust. Brown crates were stacked everywhere, at odd angles. A trail of red shoeprints led through the maze of boxes, and Sean ran after them. They led around several crates, out of a broken back window, and to the place where tire tread marks began on the pavement.

The car was nowhere to be seen. Or heard. The wind rustled though the empty parking lot.

_Gone._

Sean didn’t go back in through the window. He had time to walk back around to the front.

Inside, several crates were busted open. Another one cracked apart further in, followed by a hiss of pain and a loud _damn it_.

Michael was holding up a bloody hand. Squeezed his eyes shut and yanked a thin, crimson splinter of wood out.

Caught sight of Sean leaning against an unopened crate.

“I’m gonna find the tapes,” he promised, and started prying open another box with a rusty crowbar from the floor.

He wasn’t going to, and Sean knew it. It wasn’t meant to be. But Michael was trying anyway. Busting open crates with a look of furious determination, lips bunched up and scowling, finding only weaponry in the box and not pausing to complain about it, only whirling off to find the next one.

“You’re not doin’ this for Alpha Protocol, are you?” Sean asked.

Michael looked up from a box full of packing peanuts and empty clay vases – CRASH – vases filled with suppressors.

“Do you need a crowbar or something?”

He kicked the lid of the crate away and moved to the next one.

Michael didn’t need to answer. Sean got the feeling it was a _no_. A yes would have been fine too, though he wouldn’t have believed it. Michael was determined to hang around, and more to the point, to hang around Sean. So he made up his mind. Screw the tapes, and screw the soulmate business. It was a beautiful day, Sean had his colors, and he was going to ask Michael Thorton out to dinner. He’d say yes, or he’d say no. Either way. End of story.

“I got a first aid kit back in the car,” Sean said.

“I’m fine. Just a scratch.”

“It’s only gonna take a minute to fix you up.”

Michael thunked a crowbar in-between two slats on the crate, pulled back and popped a nail on the opposite side. Slotted it down the seam of the box and split the lid off.

“The sooner we find the tapes, the happier I’ll be.”

“Last time I checked, being happy doesn’t stop bleeding.”

“Are you going to help or are you just going to sit there?”

Sean crossed his arms over his chest, raised an eyebrow. Tried not to take the frustration in Michael’s tone personally. He still thought there was a chance of finding the tapes. He still cared. He cared at all.

Michael sighed, took a deep breath. Sat the crowbar on top of the nearest box, and leaned against a large crate, mirroring Sean’s own posture.

“Sorry,” he said. “Long day. You?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. This time yesterday I was halfway around the world tromping through the desert.”

“Then you get it.”

“Of course I do. Why do you think I’m still here?”

“Was leaving on the table?”

“Still is,” Sean said, and there was confusion but also a little bit of trust in Michael’s eyes, and hopefully some amount of curiosity. “See, I got a plan.”

“I don’t like plans. The moment you start making plans is the moment people go off script.”

“Try not to go off script, then,” he said dryly. “Because this plan involves you too.”

Michael’s eyes widened ever so slightly, and he patted the air with his hands.

“Sean, I’m gonna stop you there-”

“Ya don’t even know what I was about to say.”

“I…have a feeling.”

“You…do,” he said, mimicking Michael without quite meaning to. That stung. Stung like hell, lashing at the inside of his ribs in small little licks.

“Yeah, uh…”

Michael fidgeted with his fingers for a moment.

“I don’t…” he said, stumbling over the words. “I want to find these tapes first.”

“Why?” Sean asked immediately. “Why do you care?”

“Ever heard of pride in your work?”

“No.”

“Then you’d – wait, what?”

There was a suspicion. One he felt stupid for never having considered before.

“I think you want those tapes,” he said slowly, “because you lied about them.”

But soulmates don’t lie to one another, right?

_Michael, for the last time, is not yours._

Michael stood up fully, frowning deeply, tense.

“I was there, Sean. I saw the thief. What exactly do you think I’m lying about?”

“I think you were on those tapes, Mikey.”

But why would he lie about it? Why would he-

It hit him hard, like Michael had taken the crowbar and thwoked him in the stomach with it. A perfect reason for lying about the tapes.

Michael _was_ the thief.

 _Now_ that, he thought darkly, that _would be my luck._

“Why do you want the tapes, Michael?”

“I-”

“ _Why_ do you want the tapes?”

“You can’t really think-”

“I want,” Sean said, dropping his voice low and quiet. “The truth.”

Michael looked down at the floor. Glanced quickly up at Sean, then back down. Now he was the one who looked like he’d taken the wrong side of a crowbar to the gut.

“It’s dumb,” he muttered.

Sean waited.

“I just-” Then Michael sighed. Heaved himself out of his hunched over position, let his gaze wander around the warehouse, from open box to open box.

“It’s bad luck,” he said. “To date on a mission, I mean. And I know it’s old superstitious crap, okay, but I-”

“What?” Sean interrupted.

“Dating while you’re on a mission,” he repeated miserably. “I know it’s bullshit, and it probably isn’t true, but I mean, I can’t do it. I tried it a couple of times, I nearly got killed every single one. Can’t just be coincidence. And if it makes you feel better, that’s the only reason I’d say no. So I want these damn tapes. I want them _in_ my hands, so I can get them _out_ of my hands, because I’ve got plans for my hands that are much more interesting.

“And,” he added, with a quick outline of a smile, “these plans kind of involve you. So…yeah. You aren’t gonna laugh, are you? This is a legit source of bad luck, so I wouldn’t laugh. If I were you.”

“Who said anything about a date?” Sean said, as soon he remembered how to talk.

“You were about to.”

“No I wasn’t,” he lied.

“Riiight. Well, once we find these tapes, you can go back to not being about to ask.”

“Wait,” he said. “Just checkin’, so I make sure I was hearin’ you right. You said _if_ I’d asked, and I wasn’t about to, but if I was, you would have said yes.”

Michael grinned, picked his crowbar up and got back to work on his crate.

“That’s on a need to know basis.”

“I’m not need to know?”

“We’re waiting on your clearance to come in.”

“We?”

“Crowbar and Crate and Company. Since we’re the only ones doing any work and all.”

“That’s extortion.”

“What’s extortion?”

“You’re holding my imaginary clearance up until I start helpin’ you with the boxes.”

“Is _that_ what extortion means?” Michael said, laughing and sticking his head into another crate.

“Glad I could help expand your vocab.”

“I’m a trained linguist, Sean. I don’t need help with my vocab.”

A linguist? This was suddenly the most interesting field he could have imagined.

“It’s the thought that counts, Mikey.”

Michael untangled himself from several strands of unspooled copper wire and brushed some tiny slips of wood and dust from his hair.

“You know, as much as I love debating legalities and language with you, Sean, you know what I love more?”

“Pallets?”

“What? Oh, because of the crates. No,” he said. “I love food. And, if this ‘not a date’ involves food in any way, shape, or form, I’d much rather be doing that than raiding a warehouse.”

“Then I guess you better work a little faster, huh?”

 _“Or,”_ he suggested. “You can pitch in.”

“I would love to,” he said, spreading his empty arms, “but I don’t have a crowbar.”

“You should have said something sooner.”

Michael jimmied the crowbar around, and twisted it free of the current box.

“I saw another one around here somewhere. You can have this one.”

“The tapes aren’t here,” Sean said. “You aren’t gonna find them.”

 _“We_ aren’t going to find them,” he emphasized. “And we won’t if you keep sitting there all afternoon.”

“I got another good idea.”

“You’re going to go find the crowbar yourself?”

“Better.”

Michael finally paused, wiped a hand across his forehead. The place on his palm where the splintered had skewered still a distinct spot of crimson.

“I’m all ears,” he said, and relaxed against the crate.

“We call in backup. Then it’s someone else’s problem. No more mission.”

“Westridge isn’t big on backup.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m the second highest ranking Alpha Protocol agent.”

“Meaning?” he asked, with half of a grin.

 _“Meaning_ that if I _really_ wanted to call in the cavalry, all he can do is fume. And put me on suspension again.”

“I think you’re showing off,” Michael said, and there was the other half of the smile.

The _idea_ of it. Showing off. And if he was, that wouldn’t be the way to do it.

“If I wanted to show off, Mikey,” he explained, “I’d call in a Blackhawk to airlift us to DC for a late lunch at Fiola Mare, and then we’d crash the correspondents’ dinner and steal their dessert. And when the press knows me by name? _That_ would be showing off. Calling my work friends so I can hand them a free crime scene is not showing off. See the difference?”

 _“That_ would be pointless, because minus the helicopter and the mention of dessert, I don’t know what any of it meant.”

“Well if ya _did,”_ he said, giving Michael a healthy dose of skeptical eyebrow, “you would be impressed. Trust me.”

Michael didn’t say anything to that. Didn’t know what the correspondents’ dinner was, what kind of spy…? He pushed the thought out of his mind, or rather, the thought was quite abruptly pushed out by the way Michael was looking at him. His eyes were soft, and his smile had shifted from something trimmed by bright laughter to something small, effortless, seemed like he didn’t even know he was doing it. With or without his colors, Sean had been stared at by people whose thoughts were very clearly telegraphed across their faces. But with Michael…he couldn’t tell. Or, he thought he couldn’t, because what he _could_ see, well, it looked an awful lot like the looks he’d seen exchanged between people who were…

Michael _wasn’t_ his soulmate.

 _Michael is_ not _my soulmate,_ he reminded himself sternly.

But under the influence of his eyes – that’s exactly what it felt like, _under the influence –_ oh, god he had it bad. Under the fucking influence. Had he actually thought that? He’d thought that.

“What, uh…” Sean said, words getting out before he could plan them. “What _would_ be impre- I mean. Y’know, not pointless.”

“Can I safely guess this correspondents’ dinner thing is a black-tie kind of affair?”

 _A room full of soulmates bragging about their black ties,_ he thought briefly.

“Yes,” he said, and refused to think about that any further.

“Then anything but that.”

“What, you don’t like dressing up?”

Michael entwined a finger around one of his jean’s belt loops, tugged on them just a little, and locked eyes with Sean.

“I _prefer_ dressing down,” he said slowly, breaking his gaze to deliberately glance down at the hem of Sean’s own slacks, and then back up to Sean.

“I know just the place,” Sean said, and it was a wonder Michael could hear him, because it was also a damn miracle Sean could breathe well enough to make any sound at all.

 

 

 _Outside,_ he’d told the waitress. Perhaps a touch too quickly. Michael had stifled a bit of a laugh. But fine. Outside was already too warm and inside was just not happening. And besides, it had given them a chance to watch the sky melt from crystal blue to pastel orange, descending to a hale red as the evening snuck up.

Though, he’d had a hard time tracking the changes. He’d had a hard time paying attention to anything that wasn’t Michael, in fact. He didn’t even know what he’d eaten. Something, probably, although possibly not, because his stomach felt jumpy and skittery and it wouldn’t have felt like that if he’d had something in it. But he didn’t have much time to focus even on _that_ sensation. Michael had his elbows on the moss-colored mesh metal table, telling stories about the time he found an abandoned yacht on the half-frozen Moscow River, the only person on board a gangster curled up in front of a bank of arcade machines who was whispering about arachnid monsters, who disappeared when Michael took his eyes off him, who wound up dead on the banks of the river the next morning, missing both his eyes and most his blood. The time Michael bluffed his way into a Roman NSA listening post using only an out of date passcode, a half a bucket full of charm and hours’ worth of ice cream trivia he’d had to learn the night before, when he’d discovered the post was in a dilapidated gelato shop. The time he met an American expat in Taiwan who believed in the Majestic 12 and the X-Files and that the EPA was ruling the world through real estate purchases, a guy who claimed to both be a CIA covert agent and to have once assassinated a guy by kicking his head off with a soccer ball.

And through all of it, animated, tracing out the shapes of places, the layouts, sketching out moves, smiling and wincing and laughing so happily that Sean found himself doing it too. When Michael finished the interesting bits, asked about Sean’s life, and what he’d been up to, Sean had assumed that he’d have no way to follow up. Not with a _freelancer’s_ life. Not with the best parts of Sean’s work sealed behind levels of confidentiality. But Michael had sat leaned in over the table anyway, head resting on his hands, fascinated with each of Sean’s sentences and nodding and asking even more questions. Quite possibly, Michael hadn’t eaten either, in between the talking and the listening.

In fact, given the annoyed tone the waitress gave them when she finally persuaded them to leave, this seemed the most likely explanation. Sean had gotten Michael to explain more about the CIA guy, and he was launching into a story about the need to clear out a subway and the guy’s subsequent acquisition of a subway car and several machine guns when the woman came back. He’d shoved some money at her without checking, she’d cheered up considerably, and he’d never had a chance to figure out if they’d eaten or not. A moment later he went back to not caring, because Michael stood up, and when Sean did too, he finally wrapped his arm around Sean. Walked back to the car that way. Stood there, Michael talking about running through the Taiwanese subway tunnels, and as intriguing as the idea of urban underground combat sounded, Sean was having a hard time hearing anything over his pulse. Having a hard time feeling anything but contentment at the way the arm had _stayed_ around him, and a little bit of worry that when the story was over, it would not be there anymore.

Michael must have picked up on it at some point, because he’d paused the story abruptly, and switched to holding Sean’s hand instead.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested.

The warmth in Michael’s hand made Sean seriously rethink the point of having soulmates be a thing, if there were regular people in the world who could make you feel like he was feeling.

And when Michael’s voice trailed off, leaving only the sounds of cars heading home for the night, when Michael leaned against Sean and they strolled aimlessly up and down the nearby streets under the array of velvet-black and onyx-black oil-black night sky…when everything was quiet again, Sean definitively decided there _was_ no point to the world’s soulmate situation. There couldn’t be. It was almost certainly impossible to feel better than he did, right then. And then Michael shivered, and Sean realized it was cold, and he also realized he would be more than welcome to draw Michael even closer to him. _Then_ it was impossible to feel better than he did.

“So…” Michael said, after a long long while.

“Mm?”

“Can I ask you a work question?”

There was an off-key, hesitant kind of note in his voice.

“Go for it, Mikey.”

“Great.”

He paused.

And then hesitated some more.

“Yeah?” Sean asked, curious now.

“You think they’ve found the tapes yet?”

“That’s all?” Hardly deserved the trepidation Sean had sensed. Then again, some superstitions died hard. “I got your back, Mikey. Nothin’s gonna happen.”

“Can you check?”

Checking would require digging his phone out of his pockets. And that would require either a very awkward, ungainly movement, or letting go of Michael’s hand.

A tough choice.

He went for awkward, and as quickly as he could, pulled his out his blackberry (which neither colored like a berry, nor truly black). He punched in his passcode, then the second one, cursed Westridge’s dual obsession with security and his incapability with technology, and then did the third one. No messages from his team, besides a various smattering of thanks and curses for the new assignment.

“Nothing yet,” Sean told him.

There was a tension in Michael’s hand. Sean thought about squeezing it gently, and then did it. Then thought maybe he shouldn’t have, because Michael sighed.

Sean thought of a hundred different things to say and said approximately none of them.

“It’s nothing,” Michael said, in response to the thing Sean should have said but didn’t. “Anyway.”

“Anyway what?”

“I don’t know. I was actually hoping you were going to say something.”

“I can’t wait to find this damn thief,” Sean said, because now he was thinking about the stupid tapes again. He wouldn’t find the tapes, but the thief, now that he had a good feeling about. Tapes were easier to hide than a person. And once he found the thief, Sean could put the whole business behind him.

“Ah yes. The damn thief.”

“Mm hm.”

“Can I ask you another question?”

“Shoot.”

“What are you gonna do when you catch him?”

“Move on to the next op.” And maybe take some time off. For no reason. Just in case he had things to do.

“No, I mean…” Michael sucked on his teeth for a second. “What are you going to do with the thief?”

 _“I’m_ not gonna do anything. _Alpha Protocol,_ on the other hand, is probably gonna stick him on a rendition flight to Jordan and leave him there until he tells ‘em where the data he took is. Might leave him there afterwards too, if they’re feelin’ nice.”

“Damn,” Michael said after a moment’s contemplation. “What he’d take? If I can ask that. Westridge didn’t say.”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, either. But the people he took it from do, and they – well, Halbech doesn’t play around. And they are _pissed._ ‘Drop him in Gitmo with a false name and a life sentence’ pissed. He picked the wrong people to mess with.”

“You think he’d be smarter than that.”

“Yeah, well. We all make mistakes, Mikey.”

“Are you _chastising_ me?” he said, with the beginnings of a laugh shining through.

Sean liked the sound of it.

“You don’t feel sorry for the guy? The Furies are comin’ for him and he’s out getting shot in his own warehouse.”

“We don’t know that was him,” Michael pointed out.

“We don’t know it wasn’t.”

“True.”

The night took over the space again. Sean’s feet should have been hurting like crazy, and the jetlag should have taken him out hours ago, but he hadn’t felt this awake in a while.

“I wonder-” Michael said, voice clear in the cold night air- “what would happen if he gave the data back?”

“Gave it back?” Sean laughed. Give it back? “He’s a thief; that’s not their _modus operandi.”_

“He might.”

“Why?”

“Like you said, all hell’s about to rain down on him. He made a mistake. Think about it – he’s afraid, nervous. Doesn’t want to end up getting tortured to death in some blacksite, and all over some data he probably can’t even understand, I mean…do you really need more reasons than that?”

When Michael played the scenario out, it did sound pretty hellish, all right.

“Good point,” Sean conceded. “But I don’t think giving it back’s gonna fix the problem. It’s been too long. He makin’ ‘em look like idiots, and they don’t like it, to put it mildly. At that point, I’d just run. He doesn’t have a ton of other options.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Michael said quietly.

Sean elbowed him gently, keeping a careful hold on his hand.

“Don’t feel _too_ sorry for him.”

The silver smattering of moonlight that landed on Michael’s face made the smile he gave Sean seem implausibly sad.

“I wonder if he has a soulmate,” Sean wondered out loud, eyes stuck on the tiny shadows cast by the beginning of stubbly hair poking out on Michael’s jawline, and the curve of his lips.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

He looked back up into Michael’s very green eyes, metallic olive kind of sheen given to them by the moonlight.

_Doesn’t everyone?_

Michael loosed his hand from Sean’s, and before he could feel any disappointment at that fact, Michael fixed both of them around Sean, rested them at base of his spine, and pulled him a few inches closer.

_Doesn’t everyone?_

“I-” Michael murmured.

On the road behind Sean, an engine shouted and someone blasted down the street.

Michael was covered in a flash of red taillights.

“Oh _fuck,”_ he breathed, shoved Sean free, and took off down the street.

 _“Come on!”_ he yelled over his shoulder, then disappeared around the corner.

Sean would have liked to be moving. He _would_ move.

 _Move,_ he ordered his feet.

His toes twitched but that was it.

Then he heard a loud Russian curse echoing through the buildings, and the angry screech of tires, and he remembered the massive pattern of bruises blotted across Michael.

Sean’s feet came back online. He whipped around the corner in time to see Michael disappearing around the next, reaching for a gun Sean knew he didn’t have, because he’d already checked out every line on Michael. Sean had his Kahr PM9 though, nestled in a holster hooked over his belt, resting right beside where Michael’s hands had been a moment ago.

God, he’d let Michael get that close to it. He had it bad, didn’t he?

Michael cursed again.

Sean ran around the corner.

He slammed into Michael.

 _“Ai, ser'yozno!”_ he shouted, tripping a step.

“Sorry,” Sean mumbled, breathing too hard for having just sprinted two blocks. Saudi Arabia was catching up with him. When was the last time he slept?

Michael punted a loose piece of gravel into the road.

“He’s gone.”

“You mind tellin’ me who?”

“The-” Michael slapped a hand against him forehead. “You didn’t see him.”

“I can _guess,_ but no. I didn’t see him.”

“God fucking damn,” he said, without much passion to it, and nudged another piece of gravel. “He changed the plates and I didn’t get the new ones. I thought you…but I don’t know why you would have.”

“We’ll take care of him, don’t worry.” And that was a promise. The fucker in the Corvette would be allowed to commit no further offenses. Sean would call it in to Alpha Protocol; no, better, Mina had some friends in the local PD, and if he asked her really nice she might help him. He’d owe her, but he owed the driver of the Corvette even more.

“You get anything?” Sean asked as he dialed her number.

“A four, maybe,” he said, looking off down the dark road.

_A four. Maybe_

He shrugged it off. Wouldn’t be hard to find a bright red Corvette speeding through the city at this hour – what hour _was_ it, anyway?

_23:44._

Crap.

The phone dial chimed. If he woke Mina up she might literally kill him.

Ring number two. Then Sean was just going to die. The Corvette driver…he’d had to pick right then. He’d _had_ to. Michael’s arms had been encircling Sean, he’d been _right there,_ and Sean had been completely sure that Michael was about to say something and then kiss him, and then of course the Corvette driver had come along. And now Michael was glaring off into the darkness, and it was midnight, and Sean had been up for almost twenty four hours, on the heels of a very difficult mission that was starting to catch up to him.

Ring four.

Even worse. Michael had been about to say something and Sean had hoped, or at least, it had sure _seemed_ a hell of a lot like, that is-

_Doesn’t everyone?_

Doesn’t everyone have a soulmate? Wasn’t it a scientific fact? With a complicated name Sean liked to pretend he didn’t know? He’d read the books, through the long nights when it seemed like everyone else in the world was finding one another. _The Theory of Synchronous Personhood._ Everyone guaranteed a soulmate.

Not everyone guaranteed to find them.

Michael had a soulmate. Why shouldn’t it be Sean? Because of – what? Some faulty tapes?

Ring six.

Maybe…buildings were reflective, right? Maybe that was enough. A reflection of a reflection of Michael crossing the street and getting caught in someone’s side mirrors. No one had ever been able to conclusively prove what the ‘at first sight’ part of ‘you get your colors at first sight’ meant. Not a lot of solid ways to get test subjects. All the evidence was anecdotal. So maybe a bounced reflection was enough. Or maybe Michael was mistaken, he didn’t think he was on the tapes but he was. Sean’s mind was racing. It all made sense. All of it. The way Sean felt. The way his first colors were the green. The way he was standing out on the street at midnight hoping and praying that Michael had been about to say something to that effect.

_I…I think I’m your soulmate, Sean._

It wasn’t supposed to happen to him.

But what if it was?

_Doesn’t everyone?_

He didn’t notice he’d gotten Mina’s voicemail until the system let out a harsh BEEP! He hung it up in a hurry. Alpha Protocol it was.

Alpha Protocol.

Maybe there was a reason Sean had been assigned the boring, busywork job of reviewing those tapes. Maybe there was a reason he’d impulsively called Westridge ‘sir’. All the accounts he’d read about soulmates talked about a sense of destiny, of inevitability. It made sense. It all made sense. Sean had just been too stubborn or shocked, probably, to figure it out back when he first met Michael.

He pressed in the numbers one by one, careful not to miss any. His head was spinning. It was possible. Michael could…he’d looked at Sean the way Sean had seen soulmates look at one another.

“Hey, Mike,” Sean said lightly, voice coming to close to going too high for comfort.

“I got it!” Michael shouted suddenly, clapping his hands together. “I know how we find him.”

He spun around.

“I’m shit at license plates. Haven’t reviewed them in a while. How good are you?”

“At…license plates?” He didn’t follow. He was having trouble doing the mental 180 the question required.

“Listen, I _think_ its Arizona, but I could be wrong. It was blue. It might be Connecticut. You know what states have blue plates?”

 _“Blue_ plates?” Sean repeated.

It was Michael. It was him.

“Yeah, the…” Michael said, his excited shifting from foot to foot slowing. “The blue ones.”

If Sean had needed any more proof that was it. And Sean’s own eyes were blue. Blue grey. So of course this would be how he found out. Destiny.

 _“Oh, shit,”_ Michael whispered, and the oddity of the reaction sent a cold shiver through the center of Sean’s otherwise very warm and happy center.

Sean was about to reassure him, smooth away whatever anxious thing had prompted the tension in the whisper, when Michael spoke up again.

“Yeah my soulmate died,” he announced abruptly. “I forget sometimes that other people don’t have them. I didn’t mean to bring color into this.”

“Your _what?”_ was all Sean could say.

“I mean,” he said quickly, tripping over the words, “I didn’t mean to bring color into this, you know, if you don’t have it yet. I…the way they all talk at work I thought – uh…

His voice trailed off.

Sean didn’t say anything either.

 _“Do_ you have color?” Michael asked, his voice sounding small, as if were coming from far away.

“What happened?” Sean asked instead of answering.

Michael scuffed a sneaker against the sidewalk.

“I’d really prefer if we never, _ever_ talk about it.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” Because of course it was horrible. Losing a soulmate, that was a tragedy on its own, he’d heard the word _incomparable_ used. But death in the field, on top of that?

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

They stood on the sidewalk in a kind of silence. At this time of night, even the insects had shut up.

Michael seemed to want to say something, but kept stopping himself.

And Sean had already fucked up. _What happened?_ If he opened his mouth again he’d say something equally stupid, he knew it.

But he should say something.

If only for the ease of working together.

It’d only take one sentence – yeah, I _can_ see color, actually.

He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Couldn’t trust himself to say it without giving away what he’d been thinking – had he really been so dumb as to think, what? The reflection of a reflection? Idiotic. It wasn’t supposed to happen to him. Had he forgot? Had he forgotten so easily? One nice date and years of experience gone out the window? And what, even, would Sean say after he told Michael? If he could make it through the sentence without his voice breaking, that was. Yeah I actually can see color but I don’t like talkin’ about it. Followed inevitably by _why?_ Followed immediately by I don’t know, stop asking, the only thing I know right now is the thought of you resting in someone else’s arms, of someone else resting in _your_ arms, is making my hands bunch up and making me want to curl up on the ground both at the same time. If I could bring your so-called “soulmate” back to life and deck him across the face I would and that, now that, that’s just not fair. Or right. Or possible.

He had to say something.

“Yeah, actually-” he started, and then his voice slipped up and that was a worst case scenario come to life, Michael’s focus snapping up to him, away from where he’d been contemplating the pebbles on the ground.

“Yeah?” Michael said, and he sounded so damn eager, so hanging on to Sean’s answer, and for what? What did he want? Forgiveness? For deeply offending Sean’s superunsaturated sensibilities?

“Agent Darcy!” a tinny, distant voice sounded out from the speaker in Sean’s blackberry.

_Saved._

He mustered up the strongest smile he could.

“I should take this, and I think we should start heading back,” he told Michael. Held the other man’s gaze until he looked away. Highly unlikely that it was anything but the gleam of the moon making his eyes seem shinier than usual.

“Yeah,” Michael said softly.

And they did. And if Sean managed to keep Westridge on the phone for the whole walk back, that was more a function of Westridge being a demanding, details-oriented kind of guy. It had nothing to do with the question that would be waiting for Sean when the conversation was over. And if, by the time they got back to the Tesla, Sean was too tired to drive and called a cab for them, well, that wasn’t so he could fall asleep against the window and not have to talk. And if at some point while he was asleep, Michael paid for everything and disappeared, it probably wasn’t because Michael was upset with Sean, or disappointed. Everyone was tired. It had been a long day. And that was all there was to it. A long, taxing day that had taken a toll on his ability to think clearly. A long, taxing day that was finally, finally over.

 

* * *

 

From: Mike Thorton To: Sean Darcy Subject: FW: Smuggler Leads

> > Mike,
>> 
>> If you’re up for it, we need you next weekend to run interference. Got a lead on our thief. Job shouldn’t be too interesting, but if you want in on this case, this is where you start.
>> 
>> -Westridge

> Sean
> 
> Got any plans for next Saturday? Could be fun. And by fun, I mean it will probably annoy Westridge if I drag you into this. That’s one of your hobbies, right?
> 
> Mike

_I would never annoy the boss,_ Sean wrote back, _and even if I did, I’m up for employee of the month. Sorry Mikey. No can do._

From: Mike Thorton To: Sean Darcy Subject: FW: Operation Cove

> > Mike,
>> 
>> I know that last op didn’t turn out the way we hoped but you handled yourself well. Keep it up and I might just be impressed. We don’t have anything for you right now, but I might do everyone a favor and let you ask around. If you find anyone who needs backup on this, feel free to lend them a hand.
>> 
>> -Westridge

> Darcy,
> 
> In a rare show of generosity, last week Westridge rolled back his ‘no backup’ rule. You’ve seemed especially busy sorting out this smuggler situation; anything I can do to help? Promise I’ll treat the Tesla with the upmost respect and decorum this time around. No ditching.
> 
> Mike

_Believe me, Mikey, I forgive you, but the Tesla is a little vain. It’ll come around, give it more time. And yeah, I am busy with Operation Cove. I should get back to that. I wouldn’t ask Mina if she needs anything, because she hates me, but you might ask her. Between us, a couple of her missions have gone south and she could use the help. Stress is a silent killer._

From: Mike Thorton To: Sean Darcy Subject: FW: RE: [REDACTED] leads?

> > Mike,
>> 
>> As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t hear this from you. What you want to do with your time is your business, but if you want agency personnel anywhere near this op, we’re going to need something more substantial than rumors. Further, as you are aware, Operation Cove has been considered satisfactorily closed since last month. Sit back, Mike. We’ll find you something else to do. For now, take a vacation.
>> 
>> -Westridge

> Agent Darcy,
> 
> Look, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you’ve been avoiding me, so I’ll keep this short. I’m taking one last stab at this Cove business – ‘satisfactorily closed’ my ass, Hartford’s stayed on this and I’m guessing you have too. Anyway, consider this an invitation extended to a fellow long-suffering coworker.
> 
> Catch you around,
> 
> Mike

Sean didn’t have a good response. He let it sit for a couple of days. By the time he was ready to look at it again, another email was sitting in his inbox.

From: Mike Thorton To: Sean Darcy Subject: Satisfactorily Closed

> Agent Darcy,
> 
> Last email, I promise. First, the mission. I didn’t find anything. I don’t think I’m going to. I tried. I’ve turned over what’s left of my research to Mina. I don’t think the agency is going to do anything with it, but you are welcome to poke around.
> 
> That brings me to my second point. I think most people already know, but I’m not sure you do. I’m leaving Alpha Protocol. I didn’t work for you folks in the first place, but the point remains. These past few months have been fun, but I’ve been missing the freelance life. Anyway, it felt strange to take off without saying anything to you.
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> M. Thorton

 

* * *

 

Two weeks since Michael left Alpha Protocol.

It hurt. He leaned back onto the charcoal grey pillows of the couch, punched the power button on the remote. Late night reality TV. He punched the button back off.

It didn’t hurt. It felt like there was a curiosity-shaped negative space in the center of his chest, and if he touched it, or thought about it, the space would collapse and _that_ would hurt.

At some point, his friends had dragged him out of the house, towed him out to bars with vague but kind suggestions to _get over it,_ and at some point, it had been easier to let them think he had than it would have been to explain. Official story: he’d been head over heels for some rando. Nothing about reds and greens and blues. Nothing about other agents. It was all much simpler that way. And the less he had to think about the null space, the safer he’d be. It didn’t matter if they believed it, it mattered that he did, and he did. He did.

Entirely and completely.

Except.

Except in rare moments late at night. Those late moments, deep in nighttime when there wasn’t enough light coming in through the blinds and the window shades. Late, late, when the silver moon scribbled black and grey shadows across the ceiling popcorn. Late at night when the dimness of the world washed out the colors so totally he could pretend, for a moment, that none of it had ever happened. And then panic, and flip on all the yellow lamps in the living room, freak out because in those moments he didn’t really want it to have never happened. In those moments he’s glad it happened. He just wished it had happened with Michael.

But it’s only in those moments he can admit that. So it’s also only in those moments he has to admit he is _not_ , in fact, over a thing that never happened.

In the end, he decides he _wants_ to be over it. And he knows of only one way to do it.

He needs the damn tapes.


	3. Chapter 3

Sean adjusted the dial on the binoculars. The focus blurred, then sharpened. Fifty yards up, the woman in the ugly sedan shifted and checked her rearview mirror again. She wasn’t very good. She hadn’t seen Sean yet. But she was rich. McKenzie McKelly. New money. Board member on the council of Caesura Security, the sworn enemy of Halbech. The man who jacked their data was supposed to be here, selling it to Ms. McKelly.

He was late.

McKenzie poked her head out of her window and inspected the house across the street.

Another hour passed. So he’d been spooked. Probably by McKenzie’s constant fidgeting. Sean didn’t blame her for being worried, though.

He tapped his earpiece.

“You’re good for your distraction, Clara,” he said.

“Copy,” she said. “And you’re welcome.”

“Thanks.”

He stowed his binoculars under his seat and unlocked the door. Got ready to move.

Further up the street, the low even rumble of Clara’s midnight black Audi as it rolled along, slowed, and parked itself in the driveway of the house McKenzie McKelly had spent all morning trying to find.

It wasn’t the thief’s real house. Sean had checked it out; looked like a model home, or one someone was about to sell. No traps. Clara would be fine.

The screen door of the house squeaked open, then shut.

“She following you?” Sean asked her.

“She’s about to. Get ready.”

“You too.”

He grabbed the door handle in one hand, the tracker he needed to plant in the other. Waited for McKenzie to decide maybe she should go check out the mysterious figure in all black that had just walked into the meeting place.

“Go,” Clara said calmly.

He opened the door quickly and jogged down the street, mentally counting the seconds. Dropped down at the back of the sedan, snapped the tracker into its magnetic case, and fixed it behind the bumper. Got up, dusted his knees off, and kept walking. A minute later, McKenzie drove by, her eyes fixed on her mirrors.

“You make it out okay?” he asked Clara as soon as the car turned a corner.

“No problem,” Clara reported. “She never saw me. Tracker’s online.”

 

* * *

 

 

The business had sat abandoned and unnoticed for two weeks after McKenzie led Sean to it. Two week before the motion detector he’d set up in the parking lot sent a flashing red warning to his laptop screen.

He shut it gently and picked out two closed syringes from their case. Walked out into the main room and visually assessed the places he’d secured the shock traps. You couldn’t tell they were there. He knew they were.

Someone made loud footsteps outside the door.

Sean ducked behind a heavy desk that he’d knocked over at the start of the week.

The person rattled the door handle, then kicked it inward.

The shock traps detonated in a crackling noise that shredded the air.

When Sean opened his eyes and stood up, the man was spasming on the floor. Sean took the few seconds of opportunity to fill his thigh with one syringe of ketamine, and his other one with whatever the hell was in Westridge’s tranqs. The man slumped against the floor.

He had a flashdrive in his pocket. The data was encrypted. That would take time.

 

* * *

 

Sean shifted in his chair, took another sip of iced tea. The bright noon sun filtered through it and made graceful patterns of light when the ice cubes moved. Business people waltzed up and down the sidewalks. More down, than up. Lunch had just started. A few made their way through the tables of the outdoor café, passing Sean and heading indoors. He took notes on his personal phone, flipping over to Wikipedia whenever someone got too close to his table.

Every now and again, a Caesura employee would make the mistake of traipsing along the sidewalk. Into his notes they went.

It took five iced teas before the lunch crowd died down. Five teas and two pretentious vegetable sandwiches bought at the behest of one waitress with perfect hips and perfect lips and an even more perfect sense of dedication to the task at hand – distracting him. But they’d been doing this dance for six days now. She’d give up eventually.

He’d gotten nineteen bugs planted on Caesura bigwigs who’d come by the café. He’d gotten observations on movements. Recorded repeat visitors to the street. One more day of it and he’d be good.

Besides the waitress, no one had talked to him. No one running up shocked about why Sean’s eyes were blue when everything else was grey. No one bothered him, so he had plenty of attention to pay to the task at hand.

 

* * *

 

One more thing left.

Mina had a new nametag on her door. Sean had stuck an emoji smiley face sticker on the last one; had it really been too much effort to peel it off?

He knocked lightly.

 _“It’s open,”_ she called, through a layer of slurred sleepiness.

“It’s me,” he said, in case she wanted to reassess the level of friendliness she was showing.

“I get the hallway camera feed. I know it’s you.”

He pushed the door open. She was rubbing her face, sorting things out on her desk. A notecard was stuck to her check. She peeled it off and yawned.

“Hi,” he said, unsure of how to proceed.

“It’s on the chair,” she said, and pointed at a thin manila folder sitting on a low stool next to the door.

“Michael’s research?” she added, when Sean did not pick up the folder. “Took you long enough. I’ll email you the rest.”

He was about to take it and go before she changed her mind, but he had to know.

“How’d you know that’s what I wanted?”

She rolled her eyes. “Please,” she said, and turned to her computer.

He _hated_ working with spies.

 

Michael’s data was wild. Sean couldn’t see how he’d found the resources for it, or the time to gather it. He must have pulled in favors; some of the data was in Russian, with handwritten translations containing little notes from Michael – _I’m not sure the geotags on these photos are legit, this word is a horrible insult and I’m_ not _translating it, who the hell named their kid that?_ All of it was far more detailed than anything Sean had managed to get. Rough schedules for all the Caesura board members, dossiers and psych markups and examinations of their hiring practices post-theft. Satellite imagery of Halbech’s surroundings and of the smuggler’s warehouse – how the holy hell did he get his hands on military-grade sat imagery? His own mock mission reports. Michael had also tucked a loose sheet of notebook paper in the file with a phone number – _call me when you catch him._ Every other page was covered in Michael’s blocky handwriting and highlighter marks in neon yellow and orange.

Looking at it all, Sean was honestly shocked Michael _hadn’t_ found anything. He’d been trying hard.

 _He was trying for you,_ Sean’s thoughts reminded him. _And you didn’t even say goodbye to him._

No, he hadn’t. But that was all over now.

Between Michael’s data and Sean’s observational notes, between the inventory and shipping records from the black market merchant Sean had caught and his confessions, between and the tracking data from McKenzie and all the intel he’d gathered, Sean had a lot of work to do.

 

* * *

Sean called up a picture on google maps. The house was pretty. Though it was small, it had a short, squat porch with a metal furniture on it, looking out over a verdant green lawn with short clipped grass and floppy, thick ferns. The house was painted a light blue, and the shutters were a clean white. The glass panes shined impeccably in the sun, and the curved brass fixtures on the door gleamed.

It did not look like the kind of house the thief of a multimillion dollar data package lived in.

But Sean was sure. It had taken weeks of analysis to pin this location down, and he made damn sure it was right.

In the end, Sean had been lucky.

He’d been looking over the shipping records he’d co-opted from the black market dealer. Most of the addresses, he’d never been able to fully figure out. However, a couple of people had only ordered lowkey stuff, bullets, lidocaine, nothing major. The guy hadn’t put in quite as much work securing _those_ addresses. Sean checked them, but none had turned anything up. Or so he had initially thought, until he realized that while he’d cross-checked the addresses with Caesura employees, he’d never cross-checked them with Halbech employees. An inside job was much less likely, given Halbech’s hiring protocols, but it was possible.

And then luck stepped in. Halbech made the mistake of firing a personnel manager with a history of bad decisions and bad debts. Sean had found him late the night of the firing wallowing in a bar and bitching about his bosses. He’d either be dead in the morning or facing a barrage of implacable lawyers and about fifty thousand more NDAs. But for the night, he was alive, angry, and in desperate need of someone to pay off his tab and listen to him complain and give him some new purpose. The records Sean had gotten from him didn’t contain the information of any high level employees, but that was fine. Sean needed the invisible people.

And one address had shown up in the records. Not even an employee. It was the address where they had mailed a visitor his guest pass. A guest pass issued to a journalist almost a month before the break-in had ever happened. One ‘Matthew Saint James’. Sean could imagine a scenario where a journalist needed the kind of things that could be bought on the black market. But Sean did his homework anyway, and had found no record of any ‘Matthew Saint James’ on any national newssite, on any local newssite, he’d even spent a good day checking digitized high school papers. No journalist by that name. The person who’d mailed to Saint James didn’t recall sending it.

The house wasn’t registered to any Matthew Saint James either. Officially, it belonged to a multimedia corporation, which in turned belonged to an umbrella corporation, which was a part of a highly diversified branch of another company, and on and on. Honestly, the way ownership was set up, Sean could hardly be sure the house even existed.

But it was on google maps. Only an hour away. Sean could be there before lunch. And the best part – it was inhabited, according to the neighbors who had been just _so_ happy to tell Matthew that you got a piece of his mail by accident and are sending it straight to him, _sure_ , we’d be happy to let him know.

The thief was there.

Sean sent a screencap to print, and then also printed his entire report on the situation.

Westridge wouldn’t give him backup for this mission. But he needed it. This guy had evaded them for months, now. He was skilled, adept, probably dangerous. Buying armor piercing bullets under the table. Probably planning on implanting them in Sean’s chest as soon as he walked through the door. _He’s afraid, nervous._ Backed into a corner. Westridge would give him backup. He’d pulled everyone off the mission, sure, but he wouldn’t turn down a neat, tidy presentation of information like this. He’d let Sean go, and he’d let Sean bring his team.

He stacked the papers up, fixed them together with a binder clip. Grabbed his ID and headed out towards ops.

Why wouldn’t Yancy say yes? He’d be pissed off at the amount of time Sean had secretly spent on this, and then he’d recognize that ignoring the lead was a bad idea, and then he’d say yes. And if he didn’t, who cares? Sean would go anyway. That’s what he usually did.

Although…Westridge knew this about Sean.

What if he said yes, but he gave the case to someone else?

That’s _exactly_ what he would do. Yancy wouldn’t turn down a lead like this, not even if he disapproved of how Sean obtained it. But Sean didn’t see a single scenario where Westridge let Sean stay on board.

 _Agent Darcy_ , he’d say, _you’ve been working hard on this and I think you deserve a break. Someone will escort you to debriefing so you can get us up to speed, and when that’s done, you head home. Catch a nap._

And before debriefing was ever over, the new team would already have caught the guy, would be bringing him back. Sean would never get near him..

He slowed to a halt.

Never get near him. Or the tapes.

Sean turned around casually, checking for cameras out of the corner of his eye. Looked through the papers as if he’d forgotten something. Brought them back to his office. He’d destroy them later. For now, he needed them locked up.

He opened his bottom drawer, and on top of the papers sat his old package of colored pencils, the box a bit battered, but the pencils as vivid as the first day he’d been able to see their colors.

He tucked the folder on top of them, and locked the drawer. This would be done soon. Soon as he found the guy. Maybe he wouldn’t even bring him in, so long as he told Sean where the tapes were. That’s all he really wanted. The rest was Westridge’s deal, and Westridge would want to take away Sean’s mission, so he could go fuck himself.

Soon. Soon he’d find the tapes, and his soulmate, and then he could go back to the way life had been before.

 

 

Sean drove with the windows down, the hot smell of the highway and what promised to be an impending burst of summer thunder riding the wind. Something pointless and ignorable and fun on the radio, loud enough to get dirty looks from other cars when he’d been on the city streets, not loud enough to be heard over the wind once he was on the interstate. The Tesla hummed. Despite the scrunched up dull grey clouds piling up at the ends of the sky, it retained a sweet, peaceful, Caribbean waters kind of blue color. Glancing up at it, he could almost hear the waves.

 _It was a good day to catch a thief,_ he thought. _An okay one for finding a soulmate but a better one for catching a thief._

He pushed the Tesla a little faster. It was the kind of day, he felt, where you knew the cops weren’t going to catch you no matter what. An hour to get there? Ha. In this kind of weather, thirty minutes tops.

Ten minutes later he could barely see ten feet out the front windshield. The promised storm had arrived, and _no one_ was moving. He banged his head against the back of his seat.

Burnished silver lining – the thief would probably stay inside.

With his stockpile of armor piercing bullets and god knew what else.

The rain splattered against his windshield, some drops not finding room and sploshing down on top of other raindrops. Raindrop was too kind a word for the globs connecting with his windshield.

They were more akin to bullets trying to break through.

He sighed. He’d spooked himself, and he knew it. It was hard to stay objective. Over four months of evading Alpha Protocol. You had to be scary good to do that. Frighteningly good to do that and sleep only an hour away. This guy was dangerous.

It was more than that, though, Sean felt…well, nervous wasn’t the right word. He had the oddest sense of finality. Of conclusion. Not the way he usually felt when the end of a mission was near, it was deeper than that. It…well, if he was being honest with himself it felt uncomfortably like the feeling of destiny. He was supposed to be doing this.

_Dating on a mission is bad luck._

He rolled his eyes, even though no one was looking. Michael Thorton’s superstitions infecting him. Sean wasn’t about to get himself shot on this op.

Though he’d been on enough missions to know that was a possibility, hadn’t he?

And this guy was dangerous.

Traffic slogged forward. He checked the time. _12:09._ If traffic had been clear, it would have taken another half-hour. With traffic clear and the weather like it had been, it would have taken ten minutes. Right now? He’d be lucky if he made it in under forty.

Westridge would notice Sean’s absence, at some point.

That was one way to get backup. Call Westy from the scene and gloat about Sean’s defiance of the rules.

But that might push Westridge a tad farther than was wise.

Sean watched the rain go by for a while. Grey water streaming from the sky. He hadn’t seen this many shades of grey in a long, long time. Soft grey and stainless steel and charcoal. He used to use the words more often. Familiar, and safe.

The rain slowly started letting up, and traffic slowly started chugging along. Twenty minutes away. The sense of…superstition, he supposed that was what he had to call it. The sense of superstition was strengthening. By the time the rain had subsided to a sunny drizzle, the superstition had taken up residence in the base of his throat. And that, more than AP rounds or dangerous thieves, that could be fatal.

He couldn’t call Westridge. He _wasn’t_ going to call Mina. Hartford was on her own op.

He dialed Clara’s number. It rung on and on. He hung up after a while. If she wasn’t picking up, she was busy as well.

He _could_ run down the list.

He could call Michael.

It wasn’t an out of the blue idea, really. Michael had put more time into this case than anyone but Sean. He should get to be there, when Sean took the thief down. And it was Michael’s damn superstitions messing with Sean’s head.

And it had been a long time since Sean had seen Michael. He hadn’t said goodbye.

No. It was dumb idea. How could Sean even be sure Michael was around? Or lived nearby? Or was even in the country. _Missing the freelance life,_ his email had said. Michael was probably in some foreign city chasing assassins and dodging shadowy cabals. Sean was only ten minutes away from the thief’s house.

Michael had asked Sean to call him.

It would be polite.

It would be civil.

And Michael _had_ given Sean all his research. Sean should thank him.

He took the exit. The roads were shiny slick with rain and sun. Bad driving conditions. He pulled over in a gas station, got a strange look from the person pulling out, stopped, and dialed Michael’s number.

It rang once. Sean hung up.

What was he so nervous about?

He dialed it again. Gritted his teeth as it rung once. Then twice. Then a third time. See? Thorton wasn’t home. Four. Probably had a new phone by now. Five. Sean was itching to hang up. Six-

“Hey,” Michael said.

It was one word and the superstition bullshit was draining out of his veins.

“Morning,” Sean said.

“Se- Darcy?” Michael said, poorly concealed excitement threading through his voice.

He made a little cough.

“It’s afternoon,” he added, sounding much more centered.

“So it’s afternoon, where you are?”

“Yeah- oh, I see what you did there. Nice.”

“Thanks.”

They both paused.

“So,” Michael said after a second. “Long time, no see.”

“Yep.”

“Yeah.”

It was Sean’s turn advance the conversation. He recognized this.

“Long time,” he said instead, and winced away from the phone.

“Last time I checked,” Michael offered, “you were working on Operation Cove?”

“I was,” Sean confirmed.

“Is that why…did you find him?”

There. That’s why Sean had been calling. He closed his eyes, breathed, reset himself. Got back on point.

“Yeah, Mikey, actually, we did. See, that’s why I’m callin’ you. You wanted to know.”

“You caught him.”

He didn’t sound enthused about it. He sounded downright doubtful.

“What, you didn’t think we could?”

“No, I thought you would, I just…sorry. Chalk it up to the weather.”

“Aw, gonna take the easy way out? Blame it on the _weather?_ Thought you were better than that.”

“Oh, I’m better than that, all right. But I’m also too lazy to find another scapegoat.”

He could imagine Michael lounging around outside, maybe sitting on dark green grass, sitting under the rainy sky, letting the drops run all over his skin, sitting in the storm with his cell phone tucked beside his ear, telling Sean he was too lazy to blame anything but the weather.

The weather. Wait.

“Where are you?” Sean asked.

“Uh…” he said. “Why?”

Why the hesitation there?

“I need some backup.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I can do that. Tell me where.”

Sean rattled the address off. He’d had it memorized since he’d confirmed it.

“Oh!” Michael said. “Wow.”

“Wow?”

“Yeah, I’m not too far from there. Funny. How soon can you get here?”

Sean started the Tesla up again, eased to the edge of the gas station.

“I’m actually already off the highway. Maybe five minutes away.”

“Five-” he spat out, shocked. “How fast are you driving? It’s dangerous outside.”

“The Tesla’s got a great safety record.”

“Still. I don’t want you to die before I get there.”

“Fine,” he said, and couldn’t believe he was about to promise him this. “I’ll drive slower.”

“Even slower.”

Michael, sitting in the grass, griping his phone tightly, worried about Sean spinning out and getting hurt.

“Okay, all right. Even slower. Puts me at ten minutes away.”

“Better.”

“Where are you at-”

“Gotta go,” Michael interrupted, and disconnected with a click.

 

Sean tried not to run the conversation over and over again in his head. Tried instead to run mission scenarios. Best approaches, given the conditions. Best way to maximize the efforts of two people. Best way to not get skewered by a bullet. Best ways to think about how fast Michael would be driving, and how Sean hadn’t elicited a similar promise of safety from him. Thinking about why Michael was in the neighborhood and hadn’t stopped by the say hey to his Alpha Protocol friends, or maybe he had, he just didn’t count Sean as one of them. Thinking about Michael’s last few emails, and how he probably thought it was the other way around – _Sean_ didn’t count _Michael_ as one of his friends.

When Michael had picked up the phone, he’d been about to use Sean’s first name. Then he switched. Why the hesitation when Sean asked where he was? He definitely went visiting in town. Why else would he be here? Unless he lived around here. Lived around here but never came to see-

He made himself stop. If thinking about the mission was going to lead to thinking about Michael, then Sean would focus on the road. After all, he’d promised he would.

Ten more agonizing minute of visually absorbing every contour of the road later, he rolled his Tesla to a stop outside the thief’s house. The door was hanging open, and one of the windows was broken.

Then the screeching, hard rumbling noise of a bike engine ricocheted off the houses. A figure in a full helmet hugging a sleek black sportsbike tore down the street, then yanked the machine into a short stop ending perpendicular to the front of the Tesla, splashing water everywhere. He tugged the helmet off, and there was Michael, in an unzipped, simple mesh riding jacket and a tight, misbuttoned polo. Rough rain-spattered jeans. His hair was damp too, plastered down by where the helmet had been. He ran his fingers through it as Sean got out of the car.

“Let’s go,” he said without preamble, and jogged over to the house.

 

Someone had wrecked the living room. Papers covered everything. Books pulled off of numerous half shelves. A low square sofa upended, and the fabric bottom slit open. Clean, the room would have been a nice. All the furniture was done in varying shades of blacks and whites, and the room was highly texturized. A soft, thick rug. A few stucco texture murals on the walls. A bowl of reflective cubes and spheres.

“Looks like something out of Chromatica,” Sean muttered.

“Eh?” Michael looked up from the pile of books on the ground.

“Nothing.”

Michael with the misbuttoned shirt kept looking at him.

“Design magazine.”

“Never heard of it.”

That _might_ be because it specialized in hassling people who didn’t have any colors.

“No kidding,” Sean said instead, and started wading through the chaos.

Maybe this was the sense of destiny he’d been getting. The thief was gone. Chased off, probably, by whoever did this. He fished a book out of the pile at random. Something in Spanish. And another in Arabic. An _international_ thief, great. They’d never catch him.

But it wasn’t the thief that Sean was really after. Would have been nice, would have been fantastic. But the tapes were more important.

“So what now?” Michael asked.

“Now we start lookin’”

“For…?”

He rolled his head back towards Michael. “For the _tapes_ , what else?”

“You think they’re here?”

 _“Someone_ thinks this guy was hiding something. I think they’re right.”

“Maybe they weren’t looking for anything. Maybe they were just upset.”

Sean gave him a short snort. “Right. Professionals waste their time getting mad like this.”

“They might.”

“I doubt it.”

Sean slotted the two books back on the nearest shelf. Did it for the next few and realized searching this place thoroughly was going to be a pain in the ass. And Michael was just sitting there, fidgeting with his shirt buttons. He looked down at them, seemed to realize for the first time they were messed up.

 _“Shit,”_ he hissed, and started clumsily fixing them.

“Got dressed in a hurry?” Sean said lightly, focusing in on the books.

“What? I – yeah?”

“You got over here awfully fast.”

“Like I said, I was in the neighborhood,” Michael said, a defensive edge materializing slowly.

“You don’t have to justify, Mikey. Just makin’ conversation.”

The next book was a beautiful, thick, red-leather bound affair with old, yellowed pages. _The Three Musketeers._ In French, looked like.

“If you really have to know, I was with someone,” Michael said.

Well la-di-dah.

“Don’t let me keep ya.”

“This is more important.”

“You,” Sean said, plunking another book in the shelf, “aren’t gonna be with someone for much longer, you keep treatin’ ‘em like that.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Anytime.”

Sean almost wished he just go back to whomever it was he’d been in a state of undress with. What did Michael think he was doing here, exactly? Picking up books? Now that Sean was no longer about to get shot by an insane thief, he didn’t need backup. This was apparent. So, Michael’s concerns here were null and void.

He could hear Michael flipping through books. He refused to look over. Even though it was a very nice shirt, showed off his broad shoulders and-

No, _no._ He wasn’t going down this road again. Not this close to everything being over.

“Shouldn’t we…I don’t know,” Michael said.

Sean made it through his small pile of books. He should do a prelim check of the rest of the house, just to be sure.

“Shouldn’t we be going after the people who did this?” Michael asked.

Sean paused at the start of the hallway. Glanced down it. Two doors, and a doorway that looked like it led to a stone-tiled kitchen.

“Waste of time,” he said. “They’re long gone.”

“I…might have some relevant information on that point.”

“What?” he said, although it came out as more of a growl than he intended.

“Well,” he said, and tapped a fist against a vacant bookshelf, “A car blew by me on the way over here. I didn’t think anything of it until now. Drivers are always acting impulsive around bikes.”

“If ya think that’s a good i-”

A light on the stove was glowing red.

_Surface Hot._

There were no pots or pans on the surface, but that didn’t mean anything. The light did.

Sean loosed the PM9 from its holster, cursed himself again for not bringing anything with more punch. A shotgun would have felt nice. Grenades would have felt nicer.

“What?” Michael whispered.

“He was here. What did you say about the car?”

“I…it blew by me, came this close to killing me, I swear.”

“Maybe it was…”

Maybe it was whomever tossed the house. But Sean got a feeling that it wasn’t. Would the thief sit by while his home got wrecked? And if the thief _hadn’t_ been around, who would be chasing him?

Counter point – why would the thief wreck his own house?

Sean didn’t have an answer. He only had the faintest disquiet feeling.

“If I were the thief,” Michael said, picking up on Sean’s expression, “as soon as I knew _you_ were on my tail, I’d wanna get the hell out of the country – ASAP.”

“Mmhm,” he said. He flung open the first door. A shallow linen closet. Several fluffy white pillows, a stack of solid grey towels, crocheted pale blue throw blanket. Blue? No people.

“Sean,” Michael said. “Hey.”

Sean closed the linen closet door, approached the second. Bedroom. And bathroom? The house was _small._

“I’ve got FAA contacts. I’ll go get the airport on alert, cover it.”

“Suit yourself.”

The door was slightly ajar. He inspected the space between the door and the frame, didn’t see any wires, any string, anything that might indicate he should not do what he wanted, and fling the door open.

_Bang!_

He could almost feel Michael wincing behind him. Sean swept the barrel of the PM9 across the room. It was as different from the living room as black was from white. A nightmare of styles. Long tie-dye curtains. A swamp of oddly shaped pillows and neon plaid comforters falling off the mattress, over the bedside tables, and onto the floor. Hypersaturated framed photographs of national capitals hanging askance on the walls.

And on the farthest side, under the window, a solid black desk that looked like it had been lifted from a high school science classroom, stacked with papers and torn open cardboard boxes.

Bingo.

“See you in a few, Darcy!” Michael called out from the living room, and Sean heard the front door shut. Sean crossed the room, pushed one of the outrageous tie-dye curtains out of the way. Michael hurried across the lawn, gloves and jacket on, a red book tucked under his arm – the French book Sean had shelved, looked like. Sean supposed the thief wouldn’t miss it. Though, stealing from a thief – a little too ironic for Sean’s tastes.

It meant Michael spoke French, then. Had he been murmuring sweet French nothings into the ear of his lover before Sean had called? But then he’d dropped everything. Made it over here ten minutes-

Sean was _not_ going down this road again.

The first box was mostly empty. Blank pages, math calculations, a few printouts of national news articles. Michael’s tires squealed and then sound of his bike’s engine faded as he bolted down the street on his self-appointed mission.

Catching the thief. Finding the tapes.

The next box looked more promising. The first page was the blueprints for a building. He couldn’t find a chair for the desk, so he picked the box up, brought it over to the bed. Memory foam, he noted absently. There were pages and pages of the schematics. No building Sean had ever seen. A complicated place, though. Plenty of cameras. Another target? He flipped through a dozen of them. Only a few notes, all in Russian. He’d have someone translate them back at base. Or he’d call Michael.

Then came detailed reports on the movements and behaviors of several codenamed people. Vices, virtues, schedules. A past job, or a future one? He scanned the paper quickly, freezing over a note in a bullet point.

  * _Unfortunately, KEPLER keeps going to LOCHNESS_
    * _probably should swing by again_
    * _note to self: come up with plan to stop waitress from foisting dumb-ass sandwiches on me. what the bullshit kind of food is watercress anyway? and fuck cucumbers_



Sean knew that place. He _knew_ it. And the stupid sandwiches. These were files from the Halbech job, had to be. He grabbed the schematics again. They didn’t look anything like Halbech’s layout. Or Caesura’s, for that matter.

He turned the page sideways, flipped it back around. Actually, with the boxy, convoluted scheme, the number of twists and turns and sheer number of defensive additions, it looked a little like…

_Alpha Protocol._

Sean found his phone, eyes glued to the schematics. Each page, each building had something of Alpha Protocol in it. But why?

The Russian letters sat obstinately.

He dialed Michael’s number. Traced the letters while he waited. If this was from the thief’s successful attempt to break into Alpha Protocol…the tapes might be here. Might really, for real this time, be here. Might be sitting in the box at Sean’s side.

He couldn’t look at it anymore.

Michael’s cheerful voicemail picked up, giving some redundant information about how to leave messages.

Sean jabbed the off button, ran a hand through his hair.

Google translate took a good minute to load on his phone. The Russian keyboard option another minute. _п-р-а-к-_ т-и- _к-у_ -й _._ Enter.

It loaded.

 _Praktikuy!_ it finally returned. _Practice!_

He grabbed the schematics tightly. These were practices. These were practice for whatever it was the thief had done to Alpha Protocol. This was the box.

Such a small box. Square. White cardboard. Boring. Plain.

He sat the schematics down on the bed. He picked the stack of schedules out of the box and sat them down on top of the schematics. Got the absurd urge to call Michael back and ask him to look through the rest of the box for Sean.

The next bundle of papers was stapled. Sean gave them a cursory glance, but couldn’t focus on the words. Placed them on the growing stack.

He took a quick peek at the inside of the box. It looked to be full of papers. But looks could be deceiving.

He was about to dump the whole box out on the bed when he noticed familiar handwriting in the margins of the top page. Blocky, dark. _Send b. schematics just in case._ He’d seen the handwriting before, but he couldn’t remember where.

The rest of the pages were devoid of writing. The box was still half-full of files.

Why’d the thief left all of it here? Personal notes and case files. Was he being chased? Did he think the files had no value? Was he _that_ sure he wouldn’t be caught?

He glanced back over the handwriting, and it hit him.

He’d seen that handwriting on his own notes. Or, rather, on the notes Michael left for Sean. And on a note asking Sean to call when he found the thief.

That was _Michael’s_ handwriting.

“Bullshit,” he said out loud. Handwriting was tricky. Sean was projecting his own nervousness. It wasn’t like he had a sample of writing to compare it to.

He stood up and flipped the box upside down, papers slipping out all over the bed. Nothing _but_ papers.

His hands were shaking. He’d gotten inside his own head. Superstition, and months of work, and all of it, he’d gotten inside his own head.

He called Michael. Stared at the papers strewn about while it rang, and then went to voicemail.

Michael was driving. On a bike, no less. On highways that were reflecting full afternoon sunshine, in the rain, he didn’t have time to answer his phone, even if he could hear it.

The final box on the desk contained more papers. Old files, some with dates, some with blocky handwriting, some in Russian. Michael knew Russian, didn’t he? And Arabic, and Spanish. Like the books from the living room.

Michael’s phone went to voicemail again.

Sean kicked a pillow out of the way, paced the room. Michael had always been so strangely dedicated to the case, hadn’t he? And Sean had though it was because of him, but then, Michael had turned out to have a soulmate already and that theory had been…it’d never been a good theory to start with. And Michael had managed to make leaps and connections that no one else had, had access to intel no one else had come up with.

Had been the only one who actually had seen the thief.

But Westridge would have caught him. Or Hartford. Or anyone involved in screening Michael when he first showed up. Or when Yancy first agreed to let Michael work there. Sean would have caught him.

Voicemail. Would he be off the highway by now?

Sean should go after him. Not because he was the thief, but because the tapes were clearly not here. Only paperwork.

This time, Sean didn’t even get a ringtone. It went straight to voicemail, as if-

_As if he ditched his phone._

Michael had said something the first day they met. Something, something…

It came back to him slowly.

_If I wanted to lie to you, you would never know._

The cacophonous bunch of colors in the room was not helping the vertigo snaking around him. Michael wasn’t the thief, hadn’t been, _couldn’t_ be. Sean needed to leave. He needed to get out of here. This was all wrong. He stumbled out, tripped over a pillow he didn’t notice and had to grab the doorframe to keep from falling. Waded back through the living room and was struggling with the lock on the front door when he recalled that, as trashed as the living room had been when they first walked in, the coffee table had been upright.

And had possessed all of its legs.

One was unscrewed. It was hollow. Sitting on top of it was a small sealed envelope. The envelope had Sean’s name on it, in blocky letters.

It contained a thin black flashdrive. And a note.

 _Dear Sean,_ it started.

_I’m so sorry-_

Sean didn’t read the rest of it. He shoved it into his pocket, jerked the lock open and ran to the car. Forced it into motion and had to fight it for a second. Got control and moved. Twenty minutes to the airport. And Michael had a head start.

 

 

The rain was letting up. Sean didn’t notice. He didn’t care. Puddles of it were already blasting pure gold flashes across his dashboard. Stabbing at him every time he went to weave past someone, blinding all the other drivers and reducing them to a speed he could have beat by walking. Michael was on a bike. He could simply slip past them. Hell, he was probably there already. Sean slammed his horn down. It earned him a hearty middle finger from neighboring driver, and not much else. Then Sean caught the sight of red taillights, and traffic shuddered to a slow halt.

He slammed the horn again.

 _“Damn_ it!”

Mina wasn’t picking up. She had friends on the force, could lock the airport down.

He could call in a bomb threat. Or just call them in Arabic. Jumpy fuckers at the TSA.

He could. If he wanted Westridge to burn him at the stake.

Fuck it.

He googled the airport’s number. Was pressing it in when he heard a siren outside. A cop car and an ambulance were muscling their way down the emergency shoulder.

A very cold fear ran a finger over his throat.

He flipped the radio on, found the news. Nothing on the first channel, so he tried the next. And then the next. Gave up and searched online. Couldn’t find anything when a radio announcer began giving a brief traffic update about the accident over on I-

Sean dropped his phone, jammed the radio’s volume up.

_“…and we’re looking at delays of about twenty to thirty minutes. Probably gonna be backed up up pretty bad, folks, we’ve seen several other accidents in the aftermath of this cloudburst. Stay tuned for updates.”_

An ad for a local store came on, the jingle grating, and harsh. He didn’t turn it off. He’d missed the beginning, the part where they explained what had happened. Another cop car zipped by. Accidents could happen to anyone. Did happen to anyone. Not just bikers who were going way too fast, threading through frustrated half-blind drivers, hitting a patch of water and losing control and-

_Don’t let it be Michael._

Even if he was a thief.

He rolled the window down. Stuck his head out. Couldn’t see very far. The emergency vehicles had stopped just over the next rise. The cars crawled along. If the police were letting traffic through, that meant the accident wasn’t that bad, right? If someone was hurt, they’d need…he didn’t know. Space? He’d never been in a serious car wreck. Only fender benders. And that was dangerous enough, a car smashing into you, deadly enough when you were also in another car, but what did Michael have? A jacket? A _helmet?_ Sean felt like laughing. Didn’t feel like laughing. The radio was advertising a hardware store and wouldn’t shut up. It was Michael. It had to be him. This was fate. Evil, superstitious fate. Never going to catch the thief, not if he was dead-

_“And we’re back folks!”_

Sean sat straight up in his seat.

_“Now, uh, we’ve got some traffic updates. We’ve got two accidents on the interstate right now, uh, and it looks like the congestion near the Bouwdy Road exit is finally clearing up, good news for the lunch commute, but for all of you heading to the airport, we’ve got a small accident right before the exit, and that’s probably going to cause you some trouble. Call your airlines, folks, cause I tell you, those fees are serious. Now, over to the east-”_

He muted it. That was all? That was it?! He could have looked out the window and told them that; he _had_ looked out the window and known that. Who was it? _What_ was it? A truck jackknifing? Car skidding off the road? Motorcycle? Rider thrown on the road with his jeans shredded and gravel studding his skin and-

He cupped his hands together and rested his chin on them. Remembered to breathe. Panicking wasn’t going to help. He was stuck here. And the news probably didn’t even know yet. The accident had just happened. The medics were only just now finishing with pointless CPR, the victims only now done leaking red out all over the pavement, just now-

_Stop it._

He needed a distraction. Anything. Surfing the radio station. Refreshing the newssites. Dialing Michael’s number and hearing it go straight to voicemail. Because he’d ditched his cell. Or, because it had broken. He’d heard it ringing, saw it was Sean, had it in his hand, had been looking at it instead of- And it had snapped apart when he’d been dragged under-

Sean’s chest hurt. More than it should have.

His fingers found the letter in his pocket. Started unfolding it.

It would be a distraction. A welcome one.

He unfolded it the rest of the way, smoothed it out against the steering wheel, and started reading.

 _Dear Sean,_ it began.

_I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you much sooner but, like you said. The cost of getting caught was…let’s call it high._

_I took Halbech’s data. If you’re reading this, you haven’t figured that out yet. Or you have, and this is just some piece of evidence you are looking over before compiling a report to Westridge. Either way, I’ll go on and say it bluntly. I took it. I didn’t know what it was. For the record, still don’t, though this isn’t an ‘I deeply regret my choices’ kind of thing. If you knew how much I was supposed to get paid for the damn data, you’d agree with me. I didn’t sell it, in case you’re wondering, and it’s not on the flashdrive. I kept that sonofabitch (fifty-seven million, it’s fifty-seven million, okay, I wasn’t going to say, but I can’t help myself. Fucking fantastic). I kept the data, although I haven’t sold it. I don’t know why. I should, shouldn’t I?_

_Anyway. That’s not what’s on the flash drive. The flash drive is my_ real _reason for apologizing._

_The flash drive contains the digital records of the security tapes._

He removed the flash drive from the envelope. He didn’t feel like he was doing it, but rather, like his body was doing it without him. Turning the flash drive around in the sun. Enclosing it in a tight fist.

 _Those are the only remaining records, so be careful with them. I wasn’t the one who took them. I did_ hire _the person who took them. As the brilliant expert who absconded with Halbech’s data, I was on the tapes, see, and if Alpha Protocol ever figured that out, I was toast. Presumably, if you are reading this, I have either been turned into said toast, or I’m free and clear in a country that has good weather. I’ll assume the later. I could explain how we got the tapes, but that would take away some of the magic, wouldn’t it? I might tell you. But not in this letter, that’s for sure. It was a nice piece of quick thinking and impulsivity and luck, I will say that. If future Michael has told you, tell him to go fuck himself. Magicians and tricks and what have you. And for the record, the dickwad in the Corvette_ did _hit me. Asshole. I had the walk signal._

 _Sean, I’ll be honest. I’m stalling. Let me first apologize for keeping the tapes from you. I didn’t know how badly you wanted them. I_ thought _I did, and all I wanted to do was get them back, hand them over, and explain everything. But it turns out I was wrong. I feel bad anyway. You wanted them and I kept lying about it. Well, not lying_ per se _. The fucking traitor I hired backstabbed me and I had to hunt the tapes down. Didn’t finally find them until I left Alpha Protocol. So, I’m sorry about the partial lying. Yeah, you’re a spy and everything, but friends shouldn’t lie to each other and I’d like to think for a while there, we were friends._

_I’m stalling._

The page ended in a large empty space. Sean put the first page down carefully on the vacant passenger seat. Checked traffic, moved his car forward a few feet. Started on the second page.

 _Sean, you’re my soulmate,_ it said.

Sean stared blankly at the writing. Read the sentence again. Didn’t understand it. Read it again. Someone beeped their horn. Traffic had moved a whole foot. What?

 _Sean, you’re my soulmate,_ it said.

 _I can’t explain it. I’ve started looking into case studies. It’s hyper-rare, hypochondriac rare, but this has happened, apparently. There’s a guy in Phoenix I’m hoping to go see soon. He can’t change it, but he’s helped others learn to deal with it. Anyway, you’re my soulmate. For a while I thought I was yours. Everyone at work said you didn’t have your colors yet, said you were of the opinion you would_ never _get them. I honestly thought they were lying, or that you didn’t talk to them about it. How would they know? But you were gone for months, and I couldn’t ask you. I started assuming you had them. I didn’t understand why you were gone, why you didn’t want to be around me as much as I wanted to be around you. Then you came back. Fuck, Sean, you have no idea how happy I was. And worried. I kept asking myself, you know, what if it’s someone else? Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of? Your face when I mentioned those goddamn blue license plates…_

_I was going to tell you that night, even with you going on about rendition flights and goddamn gitmo. It was a risk, but I had to know. Then the damn fucking shithead Corvette driver came by, and I thought, Sean will still be here in five minutes. I mentioned his blue license plates and you didn’t say anything. I was afraid, and then I said the stupidest thing I’ve ever said in my life, told about the dumbest lie I’ve ever told, but I thought, I mean I thought you would say something too. I thought you would say you had your colors, and I would, I don’t know. I had so many things to apologize for already. What was one more? But you didn’t say anything. I thought you were going to but Westridge was on the phone, and then you started ignoring me. Like you didn’t want to be around me. Fuck, what do I know? Maybe you aren’t even reading this._

_I spent a month trying to figure out if it could be anyone else, but it’s not. It’s you. The first time I saw you the world started swimming, and I thought for a good twenty minutes it was all because I’d hit my head too hard, but it wasn’t._

_I could go on. About the color of the sky and the way I felt those few times I got to be around you, but it won’t make any sense until you find_ your _soulmate, and you will, I promise. I could go on, but mostly I want to apologize for keeping it from you. I was afraid, about a lot of things. And though I haven’t talked about it at length, believe me. I was VERY aware of how much shit I’d be in if we were soulmates and you ever figured out the Halbech job, like you seemed determined to._

_Anyway, you deserved to know, even if it wouldn’t have changed anything._

_So. If Operation Cove is any indication, you are going to try to locate me. I would not recommend this. The only reason you guys came close this time was because I couldn’t stay away. Risky business, that. But I thought I was in love, so…I have a history of making stupid decisions, Sean. To be honest._

_With luck, and time, all of this will just go down as another one of them._

There was another sentence under the final one, but it had been erased so harshly the paper felt a little rough.

Sean sat back in his chair. Mentally prodded himself. Didn’t feel anything. That was good. Tried it a second time, for consistency’s sake. Felt nothing at all. So, Michael was the thief. And Michael was on the tapes. And Michael was Sean’s soulmate.

The nothing held. He leaned back in his chair, folded the letter back up and put it in the envelope, along with the flash drive.

The world was a little too bright. The light bouncing off puddles and car windows and mirrors, blazing against his eyes. He thought about checking the car for sunglasses. But his seatbelt was on too tight to allow for movement. The top of the band digging into his chest, the bottom of it clamping around his waist. The hard sibilance of the song on the radio cut at his eardrums. Little bits of static sparking and popping. But the feeling of dull nothing was holding, and that was good.

He decided to try another test sentence.

Michael was his soulmate.

All good.

Michael was probably dead.

Good too.

Michael, afraid of Sean saying Westridge was going to get him killed in a prison camp, had sped off on the highway, lost control of his bike, and was most likely dead.

A twinge of pain in his stomach. He corrected himself. Michael lost control of his bike and _was_ dead.

The nothingness approved.

Sean didn’t need to hear the radio anymore. He shut it off. The car was silent.

He didn’t think much. There wasn’t much to think. The car was a little cold. Traffic moved several feet. The rain was more of a light mist now. Traffic moved another minute’s worth of space. The police cars no longer had their sirens on.

 _Michael is dead. Michael is dead. Michael is dead._ He repeated to himself as the cars got closer to the accident, started having to grit his teeth when his thought it, started to have to force it. The cars moved forward. The words stopped making sense. A cop was waving cars one by one through the single open lane next to the center concrete barriers. Cars merged one by one as she pointed and gestured at them. Most slowed so their drivers could gawk out the window. Sean moved slowly and evenly. He did not look, was not going to, really was not going to, until he made it about a third of the way past.

He looked over.

He didn’t see any bodies, or bloodstains coating the painted lane lines. He didn’t see any debris. Only two totaled cars rolled over on the edge of the highway, and two angry drivers yelling and being held back by two other people and one cop.

He checked again. Rubbed his eyes to make sure. Two cars. Two long sets of skid marks leading up to them. No bikes. No Michael.

The emptiness was holding. It was holding. Then he made it around the accident and onto the airport’s exit and it fractured apart. He had to pull over because he couldn’t breathe, was hyperventilating, couldn’t see. Held his head and couldn’t make the world stay still. He should be driving. Michael was leaving. For good this time. He didn’t know. Sean had to tell him. He pulled himself up using the steering wheel, grabbed it, turned the car on and nearly threw up. Turned it back off and sat there until he the road and the trees and the signs stopped shaking. _Drive._ Traffic might as well have not existed. Five minutes later he was easing into the long term parking, scanning for – there. Michael’s bike. The black paint glittering under the parking garage’s fluorescent lights, not a single scratch on it. Sean ran through the lanes of incoming taxis and cars outside the airport terminal, narrowly dodged a hotel shuttle. Got suspicious looks from the TSA agents milling in the crowds. Sean didn’t see Michael. He wasn’t there. The departure boards were right next to a TSA agent. Check them. Where would Michael be going, though? International? God, he could be going anywhere in the world. Anywhere.

_There’s a guy in Phoenix I’m hoping to go see soon._

Phoenix. Where was that? Sean’s mind was blanking. Arizona. Check departures for – okay, there are none. That’s fine. The queues for all the airlines were packed. He’d check online instead. Today’s departures-

Phoenix (PHX), DL 3167 - 02:05pm Status: Departed (On-Time)

Someone was taking a hammer to his ribs. Five minutes ago. The plane had probably flown over Sean while he’d been curled up in the car, he’d been too stupid to put everything aside and just drive, he could have made it. He could have made it. Or not. What had he been planning on doing? Muscling through security, and what? Some dramatic airline thing? Had his life ever been that easy?

And why would Michael be going to Arizona anyway? He said Sean wouldn’t find him. And he’d left Sean the letter. He knew what was in it. He’d written it. Phoenix would be the last place on his mind. Sean bought the next ticket to Phoenix anyway. Just in case.

“Sir?” the TSA agent said, hand around her radio.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Her frown deepened.

“I missed my flight,” he told her.

It was that simple, when he thought about it.

On the walk back to the car, he realized it was even simpler than that.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Sean wasn’t soulmate material. It was that easy. Not meant for him.

Even when it was.

 

* * *

 

Getting over Michael the second time was much harder, especially now that Sean knew he wasn’t supposed to. In the end, he didn’t try. Woke up alone and went to bed surrounded by as many pillows as he could fit on his bed. Put Michael’s house back in order and brought all the books over Sean’s place. The books were important to Michael, important enough that he taken one with him, and whoever owned the house wouldn’t be patient forever. At least this way, if he ever came back, he’d have some of his old life waiting. Sean kept the bike, too. After weeks of staring at it in his driveway, made up his mind to learn how to ride it. The Tesla had gotten jealous after a while, so he’d stopped. But he’d gotten good at it. Gotten used to the feel of it. Felt where Michael’s hands had been. Where he’d sat. Where his legs had been. Sean had gotten very good at riding it. But the Tesla was jealous, so he’d put the bike back in storage. Sean had tried to take up charcoal sketching, but the blacks and the whites were either too hard, or too bright.

He closed Operation Cove. Officially _and_ unofficially. Deleted a few days from the record and brought what was left of the security tapes to Westridge. Took both the punishment for stepping out of line and the praise for the exact same thing without comment. He didn’t tell Westridge who was responsible. He claimed he couldn’t find out. He kept a straight face when Westridge told him he could offer _that freelancer_ a permanent position next time Sean saw him.

He gave the giant box of colored pencils away to someone down the hall from him. Casually let slip that he was seeing some civilian. Let everyone else put two and two together, and let them believe or disbelieve it at their leisure. No one asked about it, though. At some point, Mina, of all people, ambushed him and told him she didn’t believe it. Told him no one did, that it seemed like he was just going through the motions, didn’t seem happy, certainly didn’t seem like someone who’d found their soulmate. He let her have her moment, then had all her furniture shipped to a hotel in Cancún and replaced with purple leather beanbags. It didn’t bring him as much joy as he’d expected it to, and he had to acknowledge that she might be right.

He called Michael’s cell a couple of times after Phoenix turned up nothing. Once sober, saying he needed to talk to Mike about his letter. Once buzzed, and Sean couldn’t remember what he’d said. Both times straight to voicemail. The knowledge that he could call the voicemail at any time and hear Michael latched onto his skin, like a burr clinging to his clothing. He deleted Michael’s number. Too late. He’d memorized Michael’s number. He spent a week trying to forget it. It didn’t work. He stopped trying.

Eventually, though, his own head grew tired with taunting him. Of reminding him every other day that he could call, of forcing him every other night to relive half-formed dreams about Michael. His brain got tired, which was great, because so was Sean. He didn’t move on. It just got easier to move in general. And life went on.


	4. Chapter 4

**[One Year Later]**

Sunday morning. The bedroom was full to the top with honey fall dawn. Sean beat his alarm by about a minute, let it ring anyway. Poor thing. It could never win, could it? He got up, got dressed. Walked around in socks because the wood floors were _cold_ this time of year. Even so, he didn’t regret getting rid of the rugs. He slid across the floor, feeling childish but loving it, then almost knocked over the stack of Michael’s books that he’d moved next to the couch. Resolved to move them again as soon as he had some free time. Or finally banish them to storage. Yes, they lent to the aesthetic, but at what cost? And the rest of the house was spotless.

He felt like a big breakfast today. He was supposed to be meeting Hartford at the range in an hour, but she’d forgive him if he brought extra biscuits along. Northerners. Didn’t know a damn thing about cooking.

Aside from the few remaining birds, the outside world was quiet. The inside world even more so. Perfect. And when it stopped being quiet, when the air was covered in sizzling noises and popping noises and the stove beeping even though _I’m right here thanks,_ that was perfect, too. A different kind of quiet. He let the things on the stove sit for a minute, stepped out back. Breathed in the brisk fall air – cold, cold, cold, but refreshing. The world smelled like dirt, which was unpleasant, but it also smelled a little like burning, which was better.

The oven started screeching again. He went in and turned the alarm off.

No time to eat here. Into Tupperware everything went, brown-red bacon and pale yellow eggs and even more pale biscuits topped with a light gold from where he’d left them in a minute too long. Hartford probably wouldn’t notice. They’d suffer from being stuck in plasticware this soon. Oh well.

He bagged the trash up, washed the dishes as fast as he could manage, and – the hell of keeping things clean – had to make time to haul the trash out to the can. He was on his way back when he noticed something that had completely escaped his notice before. Someone was asleep in a chair on his porch, wearing a light, puffy winter coat, a hat with a pom pom in their lap, short black hair, amber brown skin and-

_Michael._

One moment of shock, and one moment of running, of jumping the stairs and skidding to a halt beside him and reaching a hand out. And hesitating. Looking around to make sure this was happening. Michael’s chest rose and fell gently. His head lolled against his shoulder.

Sean poked his arm.

His eyelids fluttered, he breathed sharply, and then his perfect, fantastic, rock candy nickel hydroxide electric shock green eyes were back.

Michael didn’t say anything for a second. His eyes were focused, but the rest of him looked very tired.

“I came to surrender,” he said, a painful creaking in his voice that made Sean want to pull him out of the chair, hug him fiercely and never let him go.

“I _am_ your soulmate,” he said instead.

Michael’s blinked. “Bullshit,” he said, it both a question and a challenge at the same time.

“Unfortunately for you, it’s true. That’s a good summary of the situation, though.”

“Unfortunate! I-” His lips moved, but sound didn’t happen.

“Come inside and we’ll talk about it. Or y’know. Whatever.”

Michael kept staring at him. Lips parted as he traced words he couldn’t make, a frown spasming into and out of existence on his forehead. His hands in midair, doing nothing but hanging there.

Sean grabbed one, tugged him up, led him inside. Michael halted only one foot through the front door, wouldn’t budge.

“You kept my books?” he said, tone wobbly.

Clearly.

“Yeah?” Sean said, and then Michael had started shaking, and choking on gasps of air, started sounding suspiciously close to tears, so Sean had half-pushed, half-walked him over to the couch, deposited him there, held him through his jacket. He couldn’t believe that Michael was there. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dreaming this. Then again, in his dreams Michael had been wearing considerably less than a winter jacket, so maybe this was for real. Michael tucked his head under Sean’s, and he was shorter but not by a lot so it should have been uncomfortable, but it wasn’t. It felt like that spot had existed this whole time but Sean had never realized this because, of course, Michael hadn’t been around to discover it. His head was tucked in right under Sean’s, and it seemed the simplest thing in the world to shift another inch and kiss the edge of his cheekbone, so simple, in fact, he didn’t realize he was doing it until his lips touched Michael’s skin and someone jammed a live sparkler into his center and Michael pressed even closer into Sean. He kissed him again and Michael made a pleasant humming noise.

But he was still shaking.

“Long time,” Sean said.

“No see,” Michael finished, in a whisper. “I know.”

“What happened?”

“A lot.”

“You okay?”

Michael didn’t say anything for a moment. Sean was already holding him as tight as he could. He tried harder anyway.

“Don’t worry. It’s not you,” Michael finally said. “I had a, uh…I had a tough flight.”

“Runnin’ from somethin’?”

“When am I not?” he said, with a hint of bitterness.

“Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked, and twisted around so he could see Sean.

“No,” he said firmly. “It doesn’t.”

Michael hesitated, curling his lips for a moment. Eyes losing their focus.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “I was in St. Petersburg, they were gonna…the job went bad. Really bad. The whole time all I could think about was you. I promised myself if I made it out I would…”

He shuddered deeply.

“Kept thinking they had people on the planes. Almost got made by a sky marshal. Didn’t know where you lived. Didn’t even know if you were still here. Didn’t know if you were gonna send me…”

He was shaking again.

“Hey, hey, hey. You’re safe here. Westridge doesn’t know, and I don’t care. You’re safe.”

“You didn’t tell him?” Michael said, more of a squeak, only a little bit of air left to him.

“Mike, I never cared that much in the first place. Turn my soulmate over? Not happenin’”

“I thought-”

“I got my colors when I saw the tapes. I just wanted answers. That was all.”

“You wanted-” he said. His face twitched. “You- I was on them- And when I said- You-”

Then he started giggling. It quickly devolved into manic bursts of hiccupped laughter.

“Okay,” Sean said. “I hate to ask, but when’s the last time you’ve eaten? And that plane crap doesn’t count.”

“I didn’t eat it,” he said, in between choppy laughs. “I thought it might be poisoned.”

“What about sleep?”

He shook his head.

Well, Sean had new Sunday plans. He’d have to text Hartford.

“Alright. Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re going to get some sleep, and in a few hours, I’m gonna wake you up so you can eat. You can stay here as long as you want. Questions?”

“As long as I want?” he asked, looking up.

“As long as you want.” Thought about adding, _hell, you could stay for the rest of your life,_ but thought that might be pushing it.

Then again, this was his soulmate.

“Long as you want. Rest of the month, rest of the year…other time amounts,” he said, losing his train of thought as Michael reached up and touched Sean’s hair, buried his hand in it and pulled him in a for a brief kiss.

“Anything else?” Sean managed, lips almost touching Michael’s.

“No,” he said quietly.

Sean had been doing something. What had he been doing?

Oh. Yes. The helping thing.

The helping thing meant, however, that Sean was going to have to do something unpleasant.

He let go of Michael.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

 

Sean didn’t need to wake him up. Michael woke himself up a couple of hours later shouting. Sean hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether Michael was the kind of guy who would have preferred Sean pretend to not hear, or the kind who wouldn’t have cared. By the time he’d decided to go with his gut, the shower came on. Sean had taken the opportunity to slip into the bedroom, pull some things out of his closet. Michael was shorter, but his shoulders were wider, so Sean doubted any of his nice shirts would fit. The pants were a wash. He dug a t-shirt and some old jeans out of the closet, put them and the water bottle he’d brought on the edge of the bed, and tried not to accidentally brush his fingers against the blankets. Failed. They were warm.

He back into the living room and waited for Michael to stalk out of the bedroom, scratching the bristles on his face and yawning. Drops of water pulling each of the strands of hair on his head down before releasing them.

“You want something to eat?” Sean asked.

“No,” he said, through a massive yawn. “I want _you._ ”

“Really?” Sean said, and that sounded far too shocked. “Really.” And that sounded too sarcastic. “Really?” And there was condescending. Three for three.

_“Fuck,”_ he said under his breath, the situation more than curse-worthy.

“Not like that,” Michael said, raising a finger. Then he realized what he’d said. “Wait! Yes like that. But not right now. _Shit_ , uh, I mean-”

He threw up his hands.

“I can’t sleep.”

If there’d been a heat-seeking missile in the room, it would have been all over Sean. Fortunately, there was not. And further fortunately, Michael didn’t seem to notice this fact.

“No wonder,” Sean said, about a full five seconds too late to play it off as casual. “It’s morning.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s…I don’t know.”

“Half the time you feel like you’re missing someone.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “I guess you would get it.”

Sean considered mentioning that this was only, technically speaking, their second date. But that would only be delaying the inevitable, and he was sick of it.

He strode past Michael, trusted him to follow. “Though you’d never ask.”

Michael’s footsteps followed right up until Michael hit the bed, collapsed and started making small, even sleeping noises. One foot sticking off the bed, his face smushed into the pillow. Sean took a second to very gingerly roll him over properly, because waking up after a night like that couldn’t possibly be fun.

He thought about taking another moment to digest everything that had just happened. He could do that. Or.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Scooted over until he was touching Michael. Laid down carefully and notched an arm around Michael’s waist. Waited to see if he would do anything.

He did. Almost as if on instinct, he snuggled closer to Sean.

His hair was damp. Sean hardly noticed. The warmth of him was radiating through the cotton t-shirt. He had finally stopped shivering. He smelled like Sean’s soap, which was weird, but other than that…

Other than that, this was nice. No, that was an understatement. This was…

He’d go with _this wasn’t happening_ for now. Impossible that he should be feeling this tranquil, that all of his thoughts and doubts should have ceased to exist so suddenly. Impossible that his skin should be so goddamn hot when it was so cold outside. Impossible that he should be holding someone, and that he should have figured out how to on the first try, impossible that it made sense and that his arms finally felt like they were in the right place. Impossible that he’d ever been able to sleep without this. Impossible that he’d tried.

He had, though, hadn’t he? But now that was over. For now he got to lay there and feel Michael’s heartbeat beside him, got to count along and be lulled to sleep. He was more than happy to fall asleep even though he’d just gotten up a couple of hours ago. It wasn’t that he needed to, or even that he was _supposed_ to. He wanted to. He’d been waiting a long goddamn time to wake up next to his soulmate.

And he’d finally, _finally_ found him.

He felt like he should say something, but he didn’t know what.

“‘Night,” he finally whispered at Michael’s back.

Then he settled down, and closed his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> michael tracked his tesla records, in case you were wildly curious about how he figured out seans address


End file.
